Win7 won't always boot... hard drive?

[pgoelz]

Hi all,

I have a nice X61s that has had Vista Ultimate on it for a couple years. It has a Hitachi 255GB drive in it. A couple days ago I tired upgrading it to Win7 Professional and ran into serious issues.

The upgrade went fine but upon restart, it usually would hang at the point in the boot where the logo comes together. Two dots will appear and then freeze. The only way to get it to try again is to force it to power down and restart.

I tried the "repair installation" and it said it could not automatically repair it after doing a full checkdisk. Booting into safe mode showed it stalling on pnp.cls (or something like that.... the class for the plug-n-play devices).

Once in a while it would boot but the next time it might hang. Somewhere along the line it trashed the hard drive so I plugged it into my desktop and deleted the partitions and reformatted.

This morning I put Vista back on the reformatted hard drive (using an Acronis backup image) and that worked fine. So I once again did the upgrade (clean install, actually) and this time all was well. After configuring, installing, etc. I installed Microsoft Security Essentials and the required reboot hung again, in exactly the same way. This time I noticed the bottom of the laptop was hotter than usual (not sure why) and so I left it resting for a couple minutes. The next time I tried booting, it worked.

I'm thinking hard drive but I can't be sure. It certainly got a workout during the configuration. But it might be a motherboard resource that is overheating. I have done CPU-intensive stuff on this machine but I don't think I have ever rebooted immediately afterwards.

Anyone have any ideas? The bit that makes me think it isn't a simple hard drive issue is the fact that when it stalls it always stalls at exactly the same place. Even after several installs and restores. Anyone have any idea what Win7 is doing at the beginning of the logo sequence? I notice that there is a slight pause in HD activity at that point even on a normal boot.

Paul

[Neil]

Your description of the problem leads me to device driver software as the cause of the problem. But, know that I'm not an expert by any definition, and have very little experience with Win7. Still a computer that works fine with Vista, but chokes on 7, must be experiencing driver issues. Don't you think? Especially since the problem only happens during the portion of the boot process when drivers are loading.

[pgoelz]

That certainly makes some sense. But why am I having issues and no one else is? I'm certainly not the only one with Win7 on an X61s. And it has done it before and after running the Thinkpad system update routine.

Note that when it fails to boot, the next attempt offers the repair option. If I select that, it says something like "a required device is missing" and then attempts to fix it. That fails. It is as if something (like the hard drive) is going offline. Any chance that it starts in some compatible HD mode and then switches to DMA at about that point? I've tried setting SATA in the BIOS to "compatibility" but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

We'll see how it does over the next week or so, but it has me worried. And I don't know how to fix it.

By comparison, when it was failing to boot, it was very warm. It is now stone cold (its been sitting idle for a while).

Paul

[K0LO]

Paul:

There's an old adage that goes something like this: When things don't make sense, check your hardware. I've fixed two baffling PC issues in the last month that were caused by defective RAM. If you can, run Memtest86+ on the machine for several complete passes. Windows 7 also has a built-in memory diagnostic that you can try. Type "memory" into the Start/Search box.

[filmbuff]

This morning I put Vista back on the reformatted hard drive (using an Acronis backup image) and that worked fine. So I once again did the upgrade (clean install, actually) and this time all was well. After configuring, installing, etc. I installed Microsoft Security Essentials

your post above was a little unclear: what did you mean that you did an upgrade (clean install) after you put the Vista image back on? did you do attempt the upgrade on Vista again, or did you delete all the partitions on the HD during the win7 install or did you do something else? try to make sure that you remove all the partitions on the drive before you do the clean install.

you shouldn't have any compatibility issues installing win7 on your machine.

i've successfully installed win7pro-x64, win7pro-x86, and finally win7ultimate-x64 on my x61s. the only small tweak that i had to do afterwards was that i had to use the vista lenovo video driver to get the on-screen display controls to show (lenovo does not offer a Win7 driver) and the video driver that comes with Win7 does not support the on-screen brightness control.

[pgoelz]

Sorry I was unclear. Yesterday was a very bad day for my trusty X61s and I tried a lot of things after it went pear shaped. I'll try to re-create the sequence. Bear with me......

Oh, and I have an upgrade version of Win7 Professional. Since I have been running Vista Ultimate, it won't actually do an upgrade... it needs to do a clean install (but not a reformat).

This all started when I tried a shortcut and (using Acronis) restored my desktop Win7 installation image to my X61s. I figured it was quicker than using the Win7 DVD to upgrade my Vista laptop since the desktop was successfully upgraded the previous day and was all set up with most of the programs I wanted on my laptop. When that image failed to boot (with a bluescreen), I tried a Win7 repair install (which failed) and then an upgrade install over the top of that image. None of those booted reliably but they did boot once in a while. I then tried to restore my Vista image from a copy on the D: partition on the laptop and that terminated with a read failure that left the HD C: partition showing as unallocated. That is when I started suspecting the hard drive and totally wiped it and reformatted.

In fact I did a LOT after things went wrong including wiping the HD, reformatting, then restoring my Vista image, then "upgrading" to Win7. I use the term upgrade because that is what MS calls it. However, since I was "upgrading Vista Ultimate to Win7 Professional, I had to in fact do a clean install. Since the install transferred all my old stuff to a folder called "Windows.old" it obviously didn't re-format.

That burned up most of yesterday afternoon and evening. Late last night, I restored Vista to the reformatted HD from an image on my USB backup drive. That succeeded, but I noticed that when it booted, Vista reinstalled several drivers and asked for a re-boot. Not sure why.... the image was only a day old and from that same laptop. It smells like a clue..... did something on the MB change? The only setting I changed all day was the SATA from AHCI to COMPATIBILITY. But it was back on AHCI, same as when the image was taken.

This morning I used a different DVD drive (just in case) and once again attempted an upgrade to Win7. That went flawlessly but after about an hour of configuration and program installation (with accompanying reboots), one of the reboots failed. That is when I noticed the bottom of the laptop was way hotter than I ever remember it getting. I let it cool a couple minutes and it booted fine. And has booted fine ever since. I'm done with most of the configuration and it has been on for most of the day so it has had a chance to do its housekeeping and the HD has stopped thrashing.

Oh, and I did a full checkdisk with the find bad sectors option and it passed 100%. Ditto for the two pass Win7 memory check.

As hot as the laptop was during installation and configuration, it is now cooler than I remember it being when running Vista. And where the battery used to discharge about 1-2%/day even on AC, it seems to be staying at the same level for a long time. Maybe unrelated.

All indications seem to point to something overheating, but I don't know what. The boot failed at the PNP class file load, and I'm not sure what to make of that.... some device it was looking for going offline? The only sure thing so far is that when it is really hot, it fails to boot. When it is cool it boots 100%. So far, anyway.

Paul

[filmbuff]

that was a very detailed post (which is good) but i'm about to head to bed so want to read it thru tomorrow and pick thru it.

a quick question, since you have an acronis image of the vista as a backup have you tried doing a true clean install using a plain MS win7 dvd to totally eliminate any possible tie-in to the vista components that you have on the machine? if you wipe the drive completely and can successfully do a clean install of win7 and the machine stays stable, it's a worthwhile troubleshooting step.

also, i forgot to include in my prior email that have you eliminated the possibility that the MS security essential is not a contributing factor? i have no experience with that product and frankly have a low opinion of MS anti-virus/mal-ware products.

it's not uncommon for the machine to be warm after an OS install. i'm not totally buying that your problem may be an [over]heating issue as you have not mentioned any issues when using Vista during the time you've had the laptop.

[pgoelz]

1. I have had zero issues running Vista on this machine for two years.

2. The issue happened long before I had MSE installed. I am pretty sure it was just coincidence that the last time it happened I had just installed MSE. I run MSE on three machines and have had zero issues.

3. I wish I could do a true clean install but this is an upgrade copy so it needs to have either XP or Vista present before it will install. I think there is a hack but I haven't looked into it.

4. I'm not totally buying the overheating either but it is the only thing that seems to fit the symptoms.

Paul

[pgoelz]

Did some Googling and found this (among many others):

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/For ... a73b72f6d6

No answers yet, although some report that changing BIOS settings worked. However, I have found it is somewhat intermittent so it is easy to think that whatever you did just before it decided to boot again was the cure.

I'm doing 64 Windows Updates and the system is warm. Let's see if it boots afterwards

EDIT: Booted just fine. I also installed TPFanControl to monitor temps and control the fan. Again, not sure that temperature is the root cause but it is the best theory I have so far.

EDIT 2: I thought my BIOS was up to date but I discovered it was in fact 1.11. Current = 2.21 and one of the last updates was "added Windows 7 compatibility" so I updated the BIOS. Worked fine, and since it hasn't failed to boot lately, I may never know if that fixed it. But I note that several people complaining of the same issue are running brand new PCs so it isn't necessarily the BIOS. At least not in all cases.

Paul

[pgoelz]

Interesting. Did some more digging. Turns out that while everyone seems to think the boot is stalling at classpnp.sys, it is in fact stalling at the NEXT file in the boot sequence, which is cdrom.sys (in my case, anyway). That makes a bit of sense. In my case, there was a DVD drive while I installed and configured. It was in the Thinkpad docking base. In normal use, there is of course no dvd drive, and if I configure a boot log, the system reports that cdrom.sys did NOT load.

Given the fact that when it failed to boot the repair option claimed that the boot failed because a resource was not available, perhaps the BIOS was reporting a cdrom was available but the system could not find it? I have also seen reports that the Thinkpad docking station is not supported in Win7 x64? Something about IDE optical drives not being well supported in Win7 x64?

But I'm just guessing. Anyone have any more input? It is booting fine, but I cringe every time I boot

Paul