Boot hangs before OS spashscreen

[detrunks]

Hi,

I have a ASUS A8N-E that has very temperamental booting. On many occasions it will hang after the asus splash screen on the bit where it does some sort of checking (not sure what this is called - lots of white text and it tells me about all the hardware). It does NOT go to the XP splash screen.

Everything works fine if it does get to boot up XP.

What should I check to solve the problem, please?
What other info do I need to post?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tmagic650]

You need to check the hard drive for errors

 

[Tedster]

run CHKDSK C: from the command prompt in windows.

 

[detrunks]

thanks for the responses
I ran CHKDSK on both partitions of my hard drive - both times I had a message saying 'F parameter not specified, running in read-only mode' and then the 'DOS' box would run through 3 checks to 100% and close. I ran it a second time to be sure and this time it deleted 2 'index entry errors' - is this a good thing??!

 

[Kevork]

This might be a consequence to your problem but not the cause.

I suggest you run memtest86. Verify your RAM. Its possible that due to bad RAM your CPU randomly reboots in consequence writes incoherent data on the hardrive.

First check the ram, if the ram fails then replace it and then run a complete checkdisk.

 

[Tmagic650]

"Its possible that due to bad RAM your CPU randomly reboots in consequence writes incoherent data on the hard drive"...

Yes Kevork,
I have seen this exact issue on 3 older systems in the last 2 months. Bad memory so badly corrupted one hard drive that i had to do a low-level format on it, to restore its function

 

[detrunks]

thanks guys - I ran memtest and everything checked out (no errors). any other ideas?

 

[Tmagic650]

Reset the bios to its defaults... making sure that the boot drive and the boot sequence is correct

 

[detrunks]

The problem appears to have been solved by a BIOS update. Basically, MB's in Asus' A8N range (mine is A8N-E) have a problem with some graphics cards that will cause the system to hang at the POST stage - this is rather random but more likely to occur when your PC is reset rather than turned on from cold.. A chipset update along with the last BIOS released should solve the problem. For reference my card is a BFG 7800GT.
Thanks for the help everyone - got there in the end!!