Vista Sp1 Won't Restart Without Freezing During Post

#1 JessicaLeighFL

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Posted 30 June 2008 - 10:44 AM

Hi everyone,

I've got a 3-year old HP Compaq DC7100CMT with 4GB RAM and installed a fresh, clean install of Vista SP1 OEM copy on an NTFS-formatted HDD. What's strange is that Vista SP1 won't successfully reboot the computer when I tell it to. If I wanted to shut it down, it will do so without incident. However, if I choose to restart, it will leave Windows and go all the way down, but then it will just hang there; right when the hand-off from POST to Windows takes place.

I know that this wasn't an issue with Vista pre-SP1, because all was fine up until that SP1 "upgrade" was added. The OEM SP1 media I'm using is HP factory pressed, so it's not a case of a poorly slip-streamed newsgroup version of SP1 that's causing the reboot failure. I've performed every repair option known to Vista, but none of them made any difference, whatsoever.

I've flashed the system BIOS twice with the hope it would right itself, but that didn't help. I even reverted back to my system's default BIOS settings and tweaked the boot options list so to not give the PC any other drive to boot from, other than Primary HDD 0; thinking that perhaps there was an issue with the PC deciding which of the on-board boot devices to boot from, but that didn't help, either.

If anyone has any suggestions/resolutions for this, please let me know.
Thanks very much!

Jessica

Sincerely,

Jessica Leigh

A+ / MCP / DCSE / HPSE

#2 garmanma

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Posted 30 June 2008 - 02:52 PM

Some thoughts here:
http://www.aumha.org/

Mark

why won't my laptop work?

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#3 usasma

Still visually handicapped, new avatar (a camel) :0)

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Posted 01 July 2008 - 06:22 AM

My biggest concerns would be with the RAM and the video drivers (I believe your system uses an Intel video card). I'm not a big fan of drivers that are slipstreamed into installation media as I've had issues with them in the past.

RAM issues are sometimes caused by a problem with motherboards addressing the RAM that's not recognized by a 32 bit OS (32 bit Windows will only recognize 3.2 to 3.6 gB of your RAM). This is usually caused by an issue with the motherboard doing DMA transfers. The easiest way to test this is to remove a stick of RAM and see if the problem goes away. Updating the motherboard drivers to the Vista compatible version may help also.

The video drivers should be updated to the latest available from the Intel website (I don't trust computer manufacturer's video drivers since having several issues with video drivers from HP and Microsoft).

If this doesn't work, post back and we can troubleshoot some more.

This post has been edited by usasma: 01 July 2008 - 06:24 AM

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