Member Avatar for dscja1

had some similiar issues that drove me crazy for a couple days.

Windows XP started to freeze at boot when loading drivers. Was able to get to the HD with acroplis and make a backup. Thought an XP file was corrupt, so went to repair mode and fixboot, but this didn't work. Disabled most services. Re-seated all cards/memory. This did not work. Used memtest86 to check memory. No errors. Used Seagate to check HD for errors. No Errors. Checked Power, Temp etc... All tests came back OK. Thought maybe XP was just corrupt with a virus or something. Freeze again during install when XP rebooted. Thought maybe the DELL version of XP was checking the HD for info during install, serial numbers or such. Nope. Updated mobo BIOS. Still freezes. Could boot off floppy, DVD, HD (Win98) to DOS. Could read HD fine. What is going on here? Could it be the video card? Nvidia Gforce... Tested OK. Removed battery to reset CMOS. Still freezes. Check cables and hardware settings in BIOS. Everything looks ok. Went through many posts on several sites. People are replacing mobos, memory, hds, power supplies. Finally, after several days of troubleshooting, I see a couple posts with similiar issues. One guy replaced drive cables, and this worked for him. One guy disable DVD drive and that worked for him. I do have 2 DVD/CDROM drives. One CD-RW and one DVD-RW. The DVD-RW is the drive I always use now and it had been working fine. But the other was BAD! I disconnected that CD-RW and BAM!, Windows XP starts right up. Not sure if it was because the drive was secondary master or just gone. So check these things before buying all new hardware. You may be able to save some money/time.

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Dani AI

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Freezing at the Windows XP logo most often points to a device or driver hang during hardware enumeration rather than an immediate failure of the core OS. Threads like this one (see reports by and ) commonly trace the symptom back to a peripheral or its cabling; a focused, minimal-hardware isolation plus a few targeted checks usually finds the cause faster than wholesale component replacement.

A compact troubleshooting order that is practical years after the fact:

  1. Power down and remove all non‑essential devices (secondary disks, optical drives, USB devices, extra PCI cards). Attempt to boot with only the primary boot disk, keyboard and display.
  2. If the system boots, reconnect one removed device at a time to identify the offender.
  3. Replace suspect IDE/PATA ribbon or SATA cable with a known‑good cable; on older PATA systems ensure jumpers are set correctly (master/slave or cable‑select) and the 80‑conductor cable is used for UDMA.
  4. In BIOS, set unused channels/ports to Disabled and use IDE/Compatibility mode for SATA controllers when working with legacy XP installs (AHCI/RAID can require extra drivers).
  5. Boot from a Live Linux or Windows PE USB/DVD to exercise drives without relying on installed drivers; run vendor diagnostics on HDDs and optical drives.
  6. Swap the suspect drive into another machine (or swap a known‑good drive in) to confirm failure. Always power down and ground before handling cables or devices.

Technical note: during boot Windows loads and probes devices; a device that fails to respond or returns malformed data can block that probe and stall the boot sequence. Bad cables, failing optical drives or misconfigured jumpers are common culprits and are inexpensive to eliminate.

Including chipset, storage-controller mode and exact drive models in any further posts speeds diagnosis. Basic backups before hardware surgery are essential.

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Member Avatar for Suspishio

Nice post. It all helps to know how a problem was solved.

Member Avatar for Member #210412

i had same one with scsi cable and ide.. i still keep that cable with me... :) if someone makes me nervous i put the cable... works once then always problems :)

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