Hanging on load (boot?) screen

ryoaska1 · 20 May 2011

I have a toshiba satellite set up to dual boot win 7 and xp. I used BCDedit to set thsi up originally, and it has been working fine for over a year. The other day I was having an issue where the machine would get to the windows 7 boot screen and restart. After disabling restart on error it looked like it thought the disc or partition was not mounted correctly or something? Can't remember the exact error. I was still able to boot into XP, but XP actually complained that my hardware had changed and I needed to re-activate. It would also be really slow to complete actions- would stop working and then kick back in again every 20 seconds or so. I didn't change anything in my hardware at any point though...

After using XP for a few days, and doing chkdsk every once in a while, win 7 started magically working again with no need to reactivate or anything, but it would hang randomly and I kept having to restart it. It would boot fine after that the performance was just bad. I ran chkdsk, malwarebytes, and avast pro antivirus scan and it found nothing. Then all of a sudden on one reboot- it just stopped being able to boot again. No restart or anything... I choose Windows 7, it chooses the correct OS to boot, gets to the loading screen and just hangs there.

The screen is not frozen, I can still see the windows logo animating (like 'shimmering' light effect of the win logo), but it never loads up all the way. I used to be able to boot into safe mode, but now that doesn't work either.

Things I've tried other than already mentioned-
- windows 7 repair disc. I tried the auto-fix start-up issues. Usually it runs and tells me it can't auto-fix whatever my problem is. Once it said to reboot, and if it was fixed it would work, if not it would reload repair. It didn't work and repair was not reloaded...
-experimenting with different bcdedit settings. Hasn't helped. Just makes me think this is not problem with boot settings, as the right OS is getting loaded..just something in the OS itself is not loading correctly?

This was pre-installed on my laptop so I don't have an install CD, and I don't see any option on the repair disk to do an in-place re-install like you can on the XP install disk. Like- reinstall the OS in place without losing any of my files or already installed applications. I have a LOT of things installed that will take forever to do all over again, so if possible I would reeeally like to avoid having do a backup/full OS reinstall/recovery....

Any help is appreciated!

EDIT: turned on boot logging and attached a copy of the log.

ryoaska1 · 21 May 2011

one update-

I am now able to boot into safemode with or without networking. I'm not sure what changed...still stops for a minute on yclasspnp.sys, but then it loads correctly. I still cannot get it to boot normally without safe mode though...

I ran virus scan with avast again, malwarebytes, and a few others but nothing is being found... are there any other tools or debugging methods I can use to track this down?..

Thanks

usasma · 21 May 2011

You can order recovery disks from Toshiba if you don't have any. Here's a link with info about that (for US users): Order Recovery Discs (USA)

I suggest starting all troubleshooting with the following diagnostic tests. They'll save you a lot of time and heartache if there is a hardware failure, and you'll have the disks on hand in case you need them in the future:

H/W Diagnostics:
Please start by running these bootable hardware diagnostics:
Memory Diagnostics (read the details at the link)
HD Diagnostic (read the details at the link)

Also, please run one of these free, independent online malware scans to ensure that your current protection hasn't been compromised: Free Online AntiMalware Scanners (read the details at the link)

SIW2 · 21 May 2011

Quite a few classpnp problems recently.

Might be malware - but several scans came back clean.

Possibly caused by windows update. Might be kb982018

Try a system restore to a point before the problem.

ryoaska1 · 23 May 2011

Thanks for the responses, I'll check out that Toshiba recovery disc for the future. Will that let me do the "in place" install?

Strangely enough this seems to be working itself out slowly, but I'm still trying to track down the root cause. Eventually in my attempts to boot into safe mode, it finally started working consistently. One of those times I did chkdsk again, and when I booted into safe mode with networking it looked like it was stuck after classpnp again. I left it there and went out for the day... when I got back a few hours later I was on the login screen of a regular (non safe mode) boot!...

I've had no problems booting from that point, but for a while I was still having some problems where the OS would soft freeze... one process or another would lock up and the OS would become unresponsive even though I could still move the mouse etc... I had to reboot quite a few times. It happens less now, but I still feel like something is wrong there so I'll have to track it down. I think it must be some kind of malware- looking at system resources, nothing is taking an inordinate amount of memory or cpu capacity so I'm not sure what's going on there...