Boot Sequence Display (Version 5.1 SP2)

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For the last few day I am no longer seeing all of the boot information (white text on a black screen) displayed as my machine goes through its boot sequence.

Could I have inadvertently changed a parameter in a setup menu?

It seems a bit disconcerting to have a ‘black screen’ until the very brief splash before the desktop appears.

I tried searching on the topic, but found I lacked the proper choice of terms.

Thanks

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It certainly sounds as though you’re starting in safe mode, which displays a list of all the drivers and devices loaded. A normal boot does not display this information and shows the Microsoft logo instead.

Check your boot options. Right-click My Computer, select Properties, click the Advanced tab and then finally click on Settings under the Startup and Recovery tab. What is listed under “Default Operating System”?

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Mark,

Thanks for the reply.

Sunday I was having problems opening some of Yahoo’s pages. Rebooting solved that and reinstated the display I am talking about.

The “Default Operating System” setting is:

MSXPPro/noexecute=optin /fastdetect

It was most certainly specified by GamePC when they set up my machine.

It is clearly not “Safe Mode,” unless under XP it is far less restricted than it was under Win98.

I took some digital snaps when I was trying to restore a HDD on which I’d wiped out the partition information. Some say that a picture is worth 1000 words.

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If you’re referring to what’s in the screen shot, that’s the BIOS settings for your Intel disk controller. It’s not Windows. If you’re talking about messages that scroll by looking like

WINDOWSsystem32ntoskrnl.exe
WINDOWSsystem32hal.dll
WINDOWSsystem32KDCOM.DLL
WINDOWSsystem32BOOTVID.dll
WINDOWSsystem32ACPI.sys

then that’s verbose boot, which Bob’s instructions will disable. Or am I missing something altogether here? Specific messages would be helpful if they do not correspond to the screen shot.

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Thanks everyone for trying to explain things to me.

1) For about a week I no longer saw the scrolling information in the attached photo (just one of several screens I captured) and it concerned me. I thought I’d inadvertently reset some startup parameter.

2) The last few days the problem has ‘self-corrected’ which is nice but I don’t know what restored it.

I’ll consider the question closed unless someone knows of an explanation. If it comes back, I’ll return with another question then.

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As an added note, the WinXP version of TweakUI includes easy access to a setting to switch boots to “verbose” mode (avoiding the need to manually hack the Registry).

TweakUI–>About–>Group Policy Editor–>Computer Configuration–>Administrative Templates–>System.

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Windows Vista can be configured to boot in “verbose” mode using Vista Boot Pro utility.

In XP, a registry hack can run the boot sequence in Verbose Mode. It seems better to watch the drivers load instead of looking at a black screen or just a logo.
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This setting allows you to configure Windows so that you receive verbose startup, shutdown, logon, and logoff status messages. This may be helpful to in troubleshooting slow startup, shutdown, logon, or logoff behavior.

Manual Method: Go to Start/Run/Regedit and navigate to this key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesSystem]
To enable verbose status messages create a new DWORD value called “verbosestatus” and set it to “1”.

An additional value called “DisableStatusMessages” forces status messages to be disabled, make sure this value does not exist or is set to “0”.

Restart Windows for the change to take effect.

* please back up your registry before you fool around with it!! IMPORTANT!!!
———————————————————–

There are probably utilities around to accomplish the same results in XP.

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