Intermittent boot up & power down issue
Hi, I've been using Windows 7 x64 since day 1 of the beta release. Generally very happy but experiencing 2 weird intermittent problems which are highly likely connected to each other. 1. Sometimes when I boot up from cold, windows 7 starts to boot, it goes to dual boot screen and I selectto boot Win 7 (I can dual boot to XP on the same machine) then itrandomly reboots without an error message or warning -its a hard power reset, because I can here the fans pause for a second and the hard drives spin up again. This happens before I see any windows loading screens. When I get back to the dual boot screen, choose Win 7 again, it goes to the system recovery screen where I can choose to run system recovery or boot Win 7 normally. If I choose system recovery it scans for an age, then says it can't fix the problem. If I reboot again and choose "boot windows 7 normally" then it boots up fine and I have no problems. This only happens about 40 % of the time. I dont bother choosing system restore anymore, I just pick "start normally" and it always works fine. I never have this problem at all booting to the XP installation. It never does this power re-boot more than once on an attempted startup.2. Sometimes when I click shutdown, Windows 7 will shutdown completely succesfully, the graphics and sound and hard drives all power down, but power to the USB and fans remains on - the fans are still spinning, and usb device lights are on/charging. I have to hold the power button on the front to hard power down. This only happens occasionally, most times it seems to shutdown fully. Again, this never happens from the XP installation.Im thinking maybe these 2 things are connected, but I can be a little forgetful so don't always remember if a failed boot up follows a failed ppower down - i'll try and keep a log from now on. One suggestion I have tried is removing MagicDisc software, apparently virtual disc mounting programs can interfere with shutdown, but have yet to see if this prevents the power down issue.Please note, this is not an issue with the OS hanging on shutdown, and it is not a permanent boot failiure following installation, as has been dicussed in other threads.Is anyone else havingeither of these problems, or both together like myself? Anyone found a solution to either problem?System SpecsOS: Windows 7 x64 build 7000Processor: Intel Core 2 6400 2.13GhzMotherboard: Asus P5KC (onboard sound & network)RAM: 4GB OCZ 800MHzGraphics: NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT
April 25th, 2009 6:53pm

Hi Kagemusha Sorry that your having these problems. Normally I would recommend reinstalling the beta for this type of random issue. However, since weonly have a short time before therelease date for the Release Candidate build, I recommend waiting and performing a clean install of this build as soon as it's available.Hope this helps.Thank You for testing Windows 7 Beta Ronnie Vernon MVP
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
April 26th, 2009 5:53am

I know this has been marked as answered but im posting further notes about this issue for information purposes. Since the first post, I have had 2 failed power down shutdowns, but neither was followed by the power on reboot issue - so these 2 issues may probably be independant of one another after all. I did also state incorrectly that "This happens before I see any windows loading screens" in the original post, in fact, it shows the first Windows loading screen, the black background with the shimmering windows symbol that zooms into view - then it power reboots.Iused the microsoft debugging tools to analyse the lastmemory dumpfile present aftertheboot up issue, and the problem appears to lie in the "rdyboost.sys" file, unless I am misreading the debugging information.I also had a look in the event log for entries from the last failed power down, and whilst there appear to be no errors from the actual shutdown, I can see multiple error entries for every single time the computer resumes from standby mode. It appears to be saying various network drivers are taking a long time to restart.Finally, after someone asked me my BIOS version in another thread, I realised it was out of date by about 2 BIOS releases. I was sure I had updated recently, but apparently not recently enough (thanks to Chitbill for reminding me to check the obvious things first). So im going to try updating the BIOS first to see if that has an effect. Following that, if the issues continue, i'll move on to network drivers, and maybe change the power settings to disable standby. I will post more later.
April 27th, 2009 9:13pm

This topic is archived. No further replies will be accepted.

Other recent topics Other recent topics