D
Dave Burton
re: http://www.computing.net/windows2000/wwwboard/forum/63584.html
Tran Family wrote:
I had this happen, too, and it was DAYS before I found the solution.
The symptom was that Windows 2000 Pro would usually (though not always) get stuck with 11 bars of the "Starting up..."
progress bar on the low-res graphical startup screen (i.e., 11/18 = 61% complete). Sometimes it would eventually resume
booting, but usually it would sit there indefinitely, hung, and never making any progress.
While the computer was hung, the windows moving blue fade bar continued to cycle across the screen, but the keyboard was
unresponsive -- even the NumLock key didn't work.
Eventually, I discovered that Windows 2000 would resume booting if I briefly pressed the power button on the system unit.
About three seconds after the button was pressed, the keyboard lights would flash, and then the computer would boot normally.
Win2K is the primary OS on this computer, but it also has a bootleg copy of Windows XP Pro (with no services packs) installed.
(It isn't my computer!!!) So I also tried booting XP. The problem occurred with XP, too, though less frequently. XP usually
booted, but I saw it hang in a very similar way during startup, once, with the little moving three-bar progress indicator
scanning away endlessly, but no disk activity, and no progress. Pressing the power button momentarily caused Windows XP to
come back to life, and resume booting normally, just as was the case with Windows 2000.
After the computer booted up (with either Win2K or XP), it ran pretty much normally. However, there were a few minor quirks.
One quirk was that internet access seemed a little bit flakey with Windows 2000 (I didn't check it with XP). I had the
machine plugged into my LAN hub, and from there to a rock-solid, very fast, cablemodem-based internet connection, and this
machine could surf the web pretty well, but it would repeatedly get stuck on big downloads, even though other machines on the
same LAN had no problems with the same downloads.
Event Viewer showed no errors logged, and boot logging was unhelpful. (Why, oh why, doesn't Microsoft put timestamps in
ntbtlog.txt?)
The solution to BOTH problems, the startup hangs and the unreliable downloads, turned out to be to reseat the NIC!
This computer had a LinkSys EtherFast 10/100 LAN Card model LNE100TX Version 5.1 (marked lot no. 22085). I happened to have
an identical model NIC on hand, and when I put that one in the computer in place of the original, the two problems both went
away!
So I thought that the original NIC must have been defective, but when I put the original NIC back in the computer, the two
problems were both STILL gone.
The machine is running great, now, with the original NIC.
My conclusion is that the cause of both the startup hang and the internet download problems must have been a mis-seated LAN
card.
Who woulda thunk it?
Tran Family wrote:
I had this happen, too, and it was DAYS before I found the solution.
The symptom was that Windows 2000 Pro would usually (though not always) get stuck with 11 bars of the "Starting up..."
progress bar on the low-res graphical startup screen (i.e., 11/18 = 61% complete). Sometimes it would eventually resume
booting, but usually it would sit there indefinitely, hung, and never making any progress.
While the computer was hung, the windows moving blue fade bar continued to cycle across the screen, but the keyboard was
unresponsive -- even the NumLock key didn't work.
Eventually, I discovered that Windows 2000 would resume booting if I briefly pressed the power button on the system unit.
About three seconds after the button was pressed, the keyboard lights would flash, and then the computer would boot normally.
Win2K is the primary OS on this computer, but it also has a bootleg copy of Windows XP Pro (with no services packs) installed.
(It isn't my computer!!!) So I also tried booting XP. The problem occurred with XP, too, though less frequently. XP usually
booted, but I saw it hang in a very similar way during startup, once, with the little moving three-bar progress indicator
scanning away endlessly, but no disk activity, and no progress. Pressing the power button momentarily caused Windows XP to
come back to life, and resume booting normally, just as was the case with Windows 2000.
After the computer booted up (with either Win2K or XP), it ran pretty much normally. However, there were a few minor quirks.
One quirk was that internet access seemed a little bit flakey with Windows 2000 (I didn't check it with XP). I had the
machine plugged into my LAN hub, and from there to a rock-solid, very fast, cablemodem-based internet connection, and this
machine could surf the web pretty well, but it would repeatedly get stuck on big downloads, even though other machines on the
same LAN had no problems with the same downloads.
Event Viewer showed no errors logged, and boot logging was unhelpful. (Why, oh why, doesn't Microsoft put timestamps in
ntbtlog.txt?)
The solution to BOTH problems, the startup hangs and the unreliable downloads, turned out to be to reseat the NIC!
This computer had a LinkSys EtherFast 10/100 LAN Card model LNE100TX Version 5.1 (marked lot no. 22085). I happened to have
an identical model NIC on hand, and when I put that one in the computer in place of the original, the two problems both went
away!
So I thought that the original NIC must have been defective, but when I put the original NIC back in the computer, the two
problems were both STILL gone.
The machine is running great, now, with the original NIC.
My conclusion is that the cause of both the startup hang and the internet download problems must have been a mis-seated LAN
card.
Who woulda thunk it?