Help - problem with booting

I have been having a few problems with booting (before Windows even starts to load) which I thought I had sorted out a couple of weeks ago. However, the problem has come back with a vengeance. The machine will not get past the initial boot process - I have set it up so that I can watch what it is doing, and it starts off OK:

Initialising USB Controllers....
Keyboard 1, Mouse 1, Hub 1
.... it then finds two SATAG drives - HDD and CD
Auto detection of USB Mass Storage Devices
Device #01:

And there it stops. I have three devices normally that it detects - printer and two USB HDDS

I have detached all three devices, and it then goes past that to a blank screen.

I have interrupted the boot process to get the BIOS Setup menu, but the keyboard does not respond to allow me to do anything (I have even put in a wired keyboard). That is interesting, as to interrupt the boot to get to the Setup the keyboard must have been recognised.

I cannot even boot up from my rescue disk as the CD drive is the second selection on the boot select menu, AND THE KEYBOARD IS NOT WORKING!!!!!

Help me please before I get fed up and throw it out of the window and buy another.

Can you get into Safe Mode and access System Restore? See if you can use a restore point to roll back your machine to a date/time before the problem began?

Safe Mode

System Restore

Bump to get you another look.

Sounds like it is not actually booting from the hard drive. Have you checked the (BIOS) boot order to make sure you are booting from the windows disk?

As an aside; I can produce a similar problem if I leave a USB thumb drive connected while booting.

Thank you both - my boot order (from memory) is HDD followed by CD. I cleaned that up a week or so ago and made sure that there was no reference to anything else. I have tried disconnecting every USB thing (two external drives and my printer) and the thing gets past the initial boot screen and then goes blank.

I cannot check anything, or get to Safe Mode because the keyboard doesn't work once I get to the BIOS setup

Reset the CMOS: Clear CMOS - 3 Ways to Clear the CMOS - Reset BIOS

Then check for a BIOS update to install.

You may need to unplug the DVD drive to see if HD will boot correctly.

Likewise if it still fails during BIOS post unplug the HD to see if it will boot a disk which may mean boot code on HD is blocking boot.

Next work through these steps for Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Boot

I have finally got it sorted out by disconnecting the hard drive and all significant USB devices (two external drives and a printer) and forcing it to boot up on my rescue disk. I then reverted to an earlier backup, and it is now working.

I will do what gregrocker suggests above, but what seems to be happening is that the system auto-detects USB Mass Storage devices during system boot-up, and waits (and hangs?) while autodetecting my Lexmark printer, though why it should think that that is a mass storage device I do not know. Is there any way that I can stop it doing that, for the printer and, possibly, for the two genuine USB storage devices?

The lesson I have taken from this is to change the order of my boot process - it was HDD then CD, it is now CD then HDD. This will allow me to stop it booting from the HDD by putting in a CD, if I need to

Have you installed the latest printer driver? It may be cued in optional Windows Updates or go to the Lexmark Support Downloads webpage.

If so try also installing the latest software package from the Lexmark Support Downloads webpage.