Windows 7 - Windows 7 [32 bit / 64 bit] - Sleep / Resume problem

Good day all,

I'm usually not one to register to these types of forums, but I've ran out of ideas and am completely stuck. I will try to sum up my problem, history and the troubleshooting steps I've taken as best I can, but please feel free to request more if needed.

Description
First of all, the title of my post might be misleading, but it's what I am presuming is the root cause of all this... Just to be clear, Windows 7 [32 bit] had been working fine for the past three weeks+ before this occurred. Also, I had not made any recent software changes (at least not that day) and much less any hardware changes.

I had left my PC idle for the afternoon and came back while it was in sleep mode. When waking it I found that the components were starting up as usual, but the CPU fan was continuing to run at max speed for over 10 + seconds, rather than the short 5 seconds it does usually. Unable to get anything on the display or any response what-so-ever from the system, I proceeded to doing a hard shutdown. When booting back up, Windows 7 advised that the system had been unable to resume my sleep session and prompted me to either 1) Delete the session and start from new or 2) Try to reload the session. I chose option 1. This brought me to the first appearance of the problem. The Starting Windows animation begins and just as it would usually go to the Login Screen, the system hangs and becomes unresponsive.

Things I did after
I went ahead and did another hard shutdown. This time, Windows 7 advised that is was unable to boot correctly and that it could attempt a repair, so I did that... still same problem. Having a short fuse with this kind of stuff, I didn't bother doing much more and decided to re-install with the 64 bit version (I have access to both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows 7 through MSDN). I booted up with a USB with Slax and backed up most of my data to an external HDD, popped in the 64 bit Windows 7 DVD and scrapped the partitions and started re-installing. Everything seemed to go seamless until Windows started finishing the install at which point I got a black screen with a flashing cursor at the top left of the screen. At this point the system is unresponsive (numlock/caplocks light do not light on/offl when hitting the keys).Thinking this may have been caused by 64 bit Windows 7, I tried re-installing the 32 bit version (which had been working fine before and successfully installed after scrapping my Windows XP partition I had before), and again SAME PROBLEM.

1) I tried resetting my BIOS to default settings to no avail.
2) As of the writing of this post I am currently trying to re-install Win XP to see if that would work (also doing the thorough NTFS format).

My thoughts have me leaning towards it being a bad HDD... but it's never happened to me before.

Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated.

Dan

Might be HDD, but these symptoms could also indicate a RAM problem.

Just thought I'd drop in with a progress report.

XP finished installing and all is well... I'm thinking this may have to do with how XP formats the drive compared to Window's 7's default Quick Formatting. Suggests that whatever happened when I waked Win 7 may have corrupted a sector in the drive??

Should I try re-installing Windows 7 now or Format using my USB Stick with Slax and then try to install?

Download Seagate's diagnostic utility and scan your HDD for errors fixable and not.

Run a Windows Memory Diagnostic test from F8 at bootup. Allow at least two passes. If any errors are found, or to be extra thorough, download and burn Memtest 86 latest version and boot to run 5-6 passes.

Did you format the drive using Windows 7 installer before installing 32 bit Windows 7 the first time, and 64 bit Windows 7 recently?

If not, bad blocks might not have been excluded in your HDD.

Hi gregrocker,

I will download both the seagate tools and memtest later this afternoon and touch base with what happened. When I installed 32 for the first time I had just deleted the partition using Windows 7's partition manager on the Setup Disc. I did the very same when trying to install 64 bit. Funny thing is that XP installed/booted without any issues as I mentionned below.

Dan

If you failed to format before installing Windows 7 then it may have an invalid partition table.

XP's is different from Windows 7.

Deleting isn't enough, it needs formatting.

Still no dice yet...

Other stuff I've tried (all followed with install attemps of 64 bit):
1) Updated the BIOS to latest ver., reset to default settings
2) Tried switching my SATA drives to AHCI.
3) Tried installing with 1 DIMM, tried with one or the other in different banks.
4) Tried installing in Low res
5) Tried installing in Safe Mode

Just to clarify... what happens when I install is the following:
1) Everything goes fine until the first reboot.
2) System reboots, boots from the drive.
3) Goes through from "Setting up registry settings"
4) Continues the installation and displays the "Completing installation..." animation
5) The screen flickers once and then flickers again only to display a black screen with a flashing/flickering white cursor at the top left of the screen and everything is locked up (Only reboot makes it go away ). As it has been displayed in other forums though, I DO NOT have free movement of the mouse...

Just posting in case there might be others with the issue.

I've determined the problem seems to be the video card (99% sure). Swapped in a ATI 3870 and it installed / booted up fine. Tried swapping in the card after install, installed latest nvidia drivers and was back to the same problem. The only better test would of had been to try with another dual GPU card. I'm no expert with vid cards, but I predict the card was failing when both GPUs were working. This would explain why XP/Linux was able to boot up, I had not bothered to try installing the display drivers but the default ones would have only been using one of the GPUs. Moderators can set this as solved.

Sometimes when I think I have the latest video card drivers, there turns out to be some (beta, WHQL) that I missed. Try NVIDIA site using multiple search approaches, Windows Updates (have WHQL sooner than NVIDIA sometimes), and Googling it every which way.

I've got the same problem.
I also have a gut feeling is its my 8600GT video card or the Nvidia driver, even though event viewer is not showing that as a problem yet.