Tracing a sporadic Vista boot problem

Every once in while, my Vista installation (Home Premium, 32-bit) fails to boot. It gets to the point where the Windows orb ought to appear, but this never happens: the screen remains black until I just push the power button after which the machine starts over and boots normally.

Is there a way I can find out where it gets stuck and thus resolve the issue? The problem is that this appears completely random to me -- as far as I can tell, there isn't anything wrong with the system and I don't see what I'm doing to provoke this crash. I have Linux in dual-boot on the same laptop and that has never given me any problem so I'm fairly confident it is not the hardware.

Vista has an Enable Log button one can use at the startup menu, but that appears to only do it for one session and this doesn't happen enough for it to be worth it. Does anyone know how to enable some sort of permanent boot log? Or is there some information on this in the Event Viewer that I haven't found yet?

 

I know you don't believe it's the hardware; however, it does sound like it might be something like bad sectors on the hard drive. If the linux installation isn't sitting in the patch of bad sectors, it's not going to be affected by it, so that alone doesn't guarantee that it's not a case of your hdd developing bad-sectoritis.

I'd try running a hdd diagnostic utility that can do a good check for bad sectors (amongst other things, of course) just to make sure that you can discount the hdd as the source of your troubles.

 

That's not a bad idea. Is there some particular utility you would recommend? I ran the long version of CHKDSK and it found nothing wrong with the hard drive.

 

Check your Event Viewer, i do not think its your HD but a process or software failing to load.

If it was a bad sector, you would get the same results everytime.

 

I looked at that, but it doesn't say anything useful. The only error it mentions is this one: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949213 , but that occurs at every boot (whether successful or not).

There were also 3 errors that I fixed: first, the Nvidia Display Driver Service fails to start because it tries to execute a file that doesn't exist. Since this service doesn't appear to do anything, I changed it from Automatic to Manual and now that error no longer appears. Likewise, the Parallel Port service fails to start because, amusingly enough, the laptop has no parallel port. I disabled that one per Microsoft's instructions.

Finally, there was some volmgr error saying "Crash dump initialization failed!" which may be more relevant because the solution to it is to enable the logging of crashes (for some brilliant reason, it is disabled by default). Maybe the next time it fails to boot I may actually get a log.

 

can you try a vista startup repair?if it finds anything it will try to fix it.

 

Ah the Vista event viewer....in XP, useful, in VISTA, super useful, but harder to work through it.

Let's try the easy way first. Fortunately, VISTA includes a little known tool that tries to put a friendly face on the deep innards of Vista event viewer.

START ORB > Right click COMPUTER, choose PROPERTIES, choose PERFORMANCE on the lower left > choose PROBLEM REPORTS AND SOLUTIONS in the lower left.

Anything in the top section?

 

No, there are no solutions available. The problems described are pretty old (think last March). I tried to ask it to check for new solutions, but it didn't come up with anything relevant.

 

OK, next time this happens, START ORB > right click COMPUTER, choose MANAGE, choose EVENT VIEWER, Choose APPLICATION AND SERVICE LOGS > MICROSOFT > WINDOWS > DIAGNOSTICS - PERFORMANCE

Look through the events that happened on the previous start up and report back

 

That is a very interesting log -- thanks!

On the previous startup, it only has some warnings (all 4 events are from today when I started up the machine, in order from top to bottom):

This startup service took longer than expected to startup, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process:
File Name : audioendpointbuilder
Friendly Name : Windows Audio Service
Version : 6.0.6000.16386 (vista_rtm.061101-2205)
Total Time : 823ms
Degradation Time : 560ms
Incident Time (UTC) : 11/27/2008 4:08:37 PM

This application took longer than usual to start up, resulting in a performance degradation in the system startup process:
File Name : explorer.exe
Friendly Name : Windows Explorer
Version : 6.0.6000.16386 (vista_rtm.061101-2205)
Total Time : 4126ms
Degradation Time : 1942ms
Incident Time (UTC) : 11/27/2008 4:08:37 PM

Windows has started up:
Boot Duration : 48982ms
IsDegradation : false
Incident Time (UTC) : 11/27/2008 4:08:37 PM

Windows has shutdown:
Shutdown Duration : 10792ms
IsDegradation : false
Incident Time (UTC) : 11/27/2008 3:59:10 AM

The applications that took longer than usual to start up vary from boot to boot -- on the start up before this, there weren't any at all and on the one before that, there was some weird problem with svchost.exe which took 14 seconds longer than usual.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to say anything for the times that I've been forced to reboot the machine (it definitely happened twice in the past week; that's what prompted me to start this thread).

 

I would first try to remove non-windows (automatic) start-up processes/services first and see if any of them would cause the problem.

cheers ...