'BOOT FAILURE' new HD Or Vista?

In article <>,
says...
>If you are getting a boot failure that early in the boot sequence it has
>nothing to do with any version of Windows, Linux, OS/2 or any other
>operating system.

As a general rule yes, but as a blanket statement not always true.

Remember, I'm not having trouble with a power up boot, I'm having trouble
with a REBOOT - which means Vista has already run once.

It is very easy for Vista (or anything else) to possibly leave a device in
a state that can survive a reboot (it's rare but a definite possibility).

Say for example (this is just hypothetical) that the sound chip was left in
an unstable state on Vista reboot, and now the device is banging away on
the PCI bus waiting for some form of request or response. A BIOS reboot
does not always know how to cleanly reset every single device in the system
- it only knows how to reset what it's been programmed to do (which is
typically only motherboard chipset devices).

And I *have* had this issue before with an early linux driver for a SCSI
card. After a reboot, the teardown of the SCSI driver left the SCSI device
in a totally weird state, so upon reboot the SCSI device failed. The only
workaround was to turn off the power and restart from zero power. So this
can happen as I've been-there-done-that. :P

Like I mentioned before, I am using an older WinXP sound driver, which I
forced to install using WinXP compatibilty mode. Since this sound driver
has not been tested with Vista it could very likely not shutdown clean and
leave something "dangling" in the system on reboot. I'm going to disable
it, and see if the issue goes away.

Bit.

I ran into a computer a few years ago that retained information during a
reboot. It caused all sorts of "different" problems. It turned out to be
defective RAM. The ram was not flushing during reboot as it should. A
shutdown allowed the RAM to flush totally.

Changing out the RAM solved the problem. And yes, the original RAM tested
good with any test I threw at it - including using a hardware RAM tester.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!



"Bit" <.4you> wrote in message
news:%...
> In article <>,
> says...
>>If you are getting a boot failure that early in the boot sequence it has
>>nothing to do with any version of Windows, Linux, OS/2 or any other
>>operating system.
>
> As a general rule yes, but as a blanket statement not always true.
>
> Remember, I'm not having trouble with a power up boot, I'm having trouble
> with a REBOOT - which means Vista has already run once.
>
> It is very easy for Vista (or anything else) to possibly leave a device in
> a state that can survive a reboot (it's rare but a definite possibility).
>
> Say for example (this is just hypothetical) that the sound chip was left
> in
> an unstable state on Vista reboot, and now the device is banging away on
> the PCI bus waiting for some form of request or response. A BIOS reboot
> does not always know how to cleanly reset every single device in the
> system
> - it only knows how to reset what it's been programmed to do (which is
> typically only motherboard chipset devices).
>
> And I *have* had this issue before with an early linux driver for a SCSI
> card. After a reboot, the teardown of the SCSI driver left the SCSI
> device
> in a totally weird state, so upon reboot the SCSI device failed. The only
> workaround was to turn off the power and restart from zero power. So this
> can happen as I've been-there-done-that. :P
>
> Like I mentioned before, I am using an older WinXP sound driver, which I
> forced to install using WinXP compatibilty mode. Since this sound driver
> has not been tested with Vista it could very likely not shutdown clean and
> leave something "dangling" in the system on reboot. I'm going to disable
> it, and see if the issue goes away.
>
> Bit.
>

Are you saying that if you shutdown and turn the power off that Vista will
always boot but if you are running Vista and do a restart that it will not
always reboot? If yes then I suspect that your MOBO and your Power supply
are not in sync on the reboot or that you need a bigger power supply. I had
a similiar problem last summer with XP after adding another SATA drive and
ended up replacing the power supply with a new bigger one since sometimes I
actually had to unplug it in order to get my system to boot.

"Bit" <.4you> wrote in message
news:%...
> In article <>,
> says...
>>If you are getting a boot failure that early in the boot sequence it has
>>nothing to do with any version of Windows, Linux, OS/2 or any other
>>operating system.
>
> As a general rule yes, but as a blanket statement not always true.
>
> Remember, I'm not having trouble with a power up boot, I'm having trouble
> with a REBOOT - which means Vista has already run once.
>
> It is very easy for Vista (or anything else) to possibly leave a device in
> a state that can survive a reboot (it's rare but a definite possibility).
>
> Say for example (this is just hypothetical) that the sound chip was left
> in
> an unstable state on Vista reboot, and now the device is banging away on
> the PCI bus waiting for some form of request or response. A BIOS reboot
> does not always know how to cleanly reset every single device in the
> system
> - it only knows how to reset what it's been programmed to do (which is
> typically only motherboard chipset devices).
>
> And I *have* had this issue before with an early linux driver for a SCSI
> card. After a reboot, the teardown of the SCSI driver left the SCSI
> device
> in a totally weird state, so upon reboot the SCSI device failed. The only
> workaround was to turn off the power and restart from zero power. So this
> can happen as I've been-there-done-that. :P
>
> Like I mentioned before, I am using an older WinXP sound driver, which I
> forced to install using WinXP compatibilty mode. Since this sound driver
> has not been tested with Vista it could very likely not shutdown clean and
> leave something "dangling" in the system on reboot. I'm going to disable
> it, and see if the issue goes away.
>
> Bit.
>

Very close, but if I restart vista (reboot) then *sometimes* it does not boot.
To be precice, something is preventing the BIOS from booting from the HD on
some Vista restarts.

But, if I boot WinXP and restart it over and over, I do not get this issue.
This only happens with my newly installed Vista partition.

I did not add any new hardware, and the powersupply on this system is well
overspec'd for my hardware (this system is not highend, so it's not sucking
lots of power).

I need to spend more time on the next failure to attempt to diagnose what's
causing the problem, but I doubt it's the PSU since I would suspect that a
faulty PSU would also cause WinXP problems and other instabilities.

Bit.


In article <>, says...
>Are you saying that if you shutdown and turn the power off that Vista will
>always boot but if you are running Vista and do a restart that it will not
>always reboot? If yes then I suspect that your MOBO and your Power supply
>are not in sync on the reboot or that you need a bigger power supply. I had
>a similiar problem last summer with XP after adding another SATA drive and
>ended up replacing the power supply with a new bigger one since sometimes I
>actually had to unplug it in order to get my system to boot.

Is there any indication of problems in the Vista event logs?
Have you checked to see if you have the latest BIOS for your MOBO?

"BitBasher" <> wrote in message
news:%...
>
> Very close, but if I restart vista (reboot) then *sometimes* it does not
> boot.
> To be precice, something is preventing the BIOS from booting from the HD
> on
> some Vista restarts.
>
> But, if I boot WinXP and restart it over and over, I do not get this
> issue.
> This only happens with my newly installed Vista partition.
>
> I did not add any new hardware, and the powersupply on this system is well
> overspec'd for my hardware (this system is not highend, so it's not
> sucking
> lots of power).
>
> I need to spend more time on the next failure to attempt to diagnose
> what's
> causing the problem, but I doubt it's the PSU since I would suspect that a
> faulty PSU would also cause WinXP problems and other instabilities.
>
> Bit.
>
>
> In article <>, says...
>>Are you saying that if you shutdown and turn the power off that Vista will
>>always boot but if you are running Vista and do a restart that it will not
>>always reboot? If yes then I suspect that your MOBO and your Power supply
>>are not in sync on the reboot or that you need a bigger power supply. I
>>had
>>a similiar problem last summer with XP after adding another SATA drive and
>>ended up replacing the power supply with a new bigger one since sometimes
>>I
>>actually had to unplug it in order to get my system to boot.
>