Is there a bootlogger for Windows 7 startup and/or hibernate?

[controlio]

I have a Dell laptop that freezes one out of every 6 or 7 boots. This includes reboots and resume from hibernate. In both cases the system ALWAYS boots fine on the next attempt.

I have yet to find a tool that will give me a bootlog ala WinXP so that I can see where the previous boot failed. I tried running a trace, but the trace doesn't seem to complete until the system properly boots, and the trace doesn't show which driver hung the previous boot attempt. It only seems to show the trace from the current successful boot.

This used to be a basic function in XP. Does anyone know how to achieve a detailed text bootlog for boot and/or hibernate?

 

[gregrocker]

It would be the performance log in these Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7.

If this is still the preinstalled Win7 or have you gotten a Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7
which gets rid of a lot of corruption that throttles and causes problems for Win7.

 

[controlio]

That "View Performance Details in Event Log" is pretty cool - I've never found that before. Unfortunately after looking through the logs it doesn't tell me what hung the system, presumably because it waits until after the driver successfully loads to post the timing data. A clean install is on the list of things to do, it's just hard to mentally prepare for the day or two of driver hell I'll be forcibly thrust into, not to mention the endless number of tools I have to find again, some of which you can no longer download anymore (GMailNotify for example) and have to be carefully extracted from my system. Any other way to do a bootlog in the old manner where it would show you what was attempting to load and if it was successful? Seems like that's the only way I would be able to figure out what's failing since the freeze happens early in the boot process (before the video mode switch after the "Starting Windows" animation).

 

[DavidE]

Have you tried using this tutorial by cluberti to get a trace?

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...up-shutdown-sleep-hibernate-reboot-trace.html

 

[controlio]

I have. There was a time when my freezes were only on resume from hibernate, and hibernate traces were the only way I could find to get a log of the hibernate process. What is odd, however, is that when I get a hang on resume from hibernate, reboot, continue using the same hibernate file and boot successfully, the trace file doesn't show the failed resume attempt. I would expect to see either a large chunk on the graph where the driver hangs, or to see a point in the trace where the drivers repeat themselves from restarting the resume from hibernate process. I see neither in the trace.

 

[gregrocker]

What driver hell? Sounds like you haven't done the Clean Reinstall since XP.

Win7 is a driver-complete OS with drivers provided in installer and then quickly updated via optional Windows Updates when you enable Automatically deliver drivers via Windows Update (Step 3).