Windows 7 Professional Machine freezes on startup occasionaly.

Hi, I recently have had a windows 7 proffesional 64 bit upgrade to my computer. Before the upgrade it was Windows Vista Home Premium, with a quad core proccessor (32 bit). Now when I boot up my windows 7 machine, it frequently freezes at a certain point in the startup, it is a black screen with a little underscore that flashes, then goes to the starting windows annimation. More often than not, the computer starts normally. But 2/5 times on boot, it freezes on the underscore point of the startup. Before I had the upgrade, this didn't happen. Also when it is running (very rarely) it freezes as well. Is this common? and any solutions?

P.s I have also run a defrag with no success.

Check out these posts, see if they contain anything that might help you.

Flashing Underscore no boot. - Geeks to Go Forums
Blank screen w/ blinking underline / flashing underscore at XP boot - Windows-XP-General-Discussion - Windows-XP
Stuck on blank screen with flashing cursor and can't boot anything! - Asus - Motherboards-Memory

Thanks for the feedback, but these posts have no solution to the problem. I also fotgot to tell you what my motherboard is called. It is a ASUS M2N MX SE Plus. From observation of the posts you have linked me, I have found something that all of the problems have in common. Everyone who has this problem has got a Asus motherboard. I've tried looking further into this, but with no success. My computer still works, but Im afraid at somepoint in the future it might not.

Bear in mind, I didn't read all of those threads start to end, so if I repeat something there please forgive me.

Are on the latest bios version? Sometimes bios upgrades can fix these problems.

Are your bios settings stock? Have you tried doing a reset to safe settings in the bios?

With all due respect, the mobo looks like a very old, low end mobo. It has no support listed for windows 7. (ASUSTeK Computer Inc. - Motherboards- ASUS M2N-MX SE).

In my experience, this has either been a driver conflict or a hardware issue. If hardware it has usually been a hard drive or memory, with the occasional optical drive problem. All the reading I've done through googling your problem today suggests exactly the same.

This is everything I can think of (apart from stuff mentioned above)...


Hardware checks
----------------
You could try and disconnect your optical drive(s) and see if it boots, if it does the drive is probably faulty.

You can try running memtest to check your memory, if you haven't already.

You could try Hiren's boot CD V14 and run one of the many HD diagnostic or HD Management tools on there. Some of these tools are quite good and will pick up errors chkdsk and windows doesn't find.

The board only has two sata ports, but you could move your hard disk to the other port (if its a sata drive) and see how that goes.

If it's an IDE drive there's not much you can do Check that no two devices are configured as master or slave. Generally though, system won't boot at all if this is the case.

Remove all hardware connections, and reconnect to ensure proper connection. remove and replace memory, video card, sound cards etc.

Software checks
----------------

For your hard disk you can try chkdsk /r to check the integrity of your HDD.
or sfc /scannow to look for OS inconsistencies.

Boot your computer and select last known good configuration
Try a system restore if the problem started after installing updates, drivers or software
Boot off your Windows CD and going to to recovery console and do a repair install. This could take some time.

Download passmark (http://www.passmark.com) and run some tests and see if it shows any errors.

If none of this works, you may be looking at a faulty motherboard.

Good luck

My computer seems to have sorted itself out after a windows update. The underscore screen now only flashes 4 times and then boots up normally, it could of been a driver conflict, thats my guess. Thanks for the reply anyway, many thanks

Rowan1

Rowan1 said:

My computer seems to have sorted itself out after a windows update. The underscore screen now only flashes 4 times and then boots up normally, it could of been a driver conflict, thats my guess. Thanks for the reply anyway, many thanks

Rowan1

Glad its sorted out.

As an aside, I recently had to rebuild a PC for my sister. I had exactly the same symptoms as you, except it did it every time. The problem was that I had changed the motherboard, CPU and memory. So in this case, the drivers didn't match what windows thought was installed.

I reinstalled windows, but that was always the plan.

Take care

Thankyou