Help with booting issue

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Yesterday the boss brought his laptop in and wanted a file transferred from it to his work desktop (he’s very computer challenged). I booted it up (XP pro sp3) fine and when I put in my flash drive it seems to stall a bit installing it and then the mousepad became very erratic in its responsiveness. I decided to plug in his usb mouse but it wouldn’t power up. I ended up resetting the computer by holding down the power button. It seemed to boot ok but then the 3 blue squares in the load bar slowed right down to moving at a space per second and the drive activity light stopped. I left it like that for 10 mins but no change. Rebooted into safe mode ok so then tried a standard boot. No go. Tried a “Boot to last known good setting” Same thing. Booted back into safe mode, after checking flash on the desktop machine, inserted it into laptop and it was recognised properly. Copied the file I needed. Looked at Device manager, no issues showing there. Decided to try a system restore from a week ago, no good, laptop still won’t boot.

The fact I can get into safe mode ok means that it is most likely a driver issue. Where do I go from here?

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Ensure that all important data is backed up first and foremost.

In Device manager, expand view by: “show hidden devices”.
Check the Event Viewer for errors.
Try running a “chkdsk C: /R” or F on the drive as well.

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Try booting into Safe-mode and run MSConfig. On the General tab, select the Diagnostic Startup radio button. Then try a normal boot. If that works, run msconfig again and select the Selective Startup Radio button and check everything except Load Startup items and try to boot again. If the boot works, go to the startup tab and use a process of elimination to find the problematic item. If the boot fails, go back into Safemode and run msconfig again, and uncheck Load System Services and try again. If the boot now works, go to the services tab and check hide Microsoft Services and uncheck the remaining services. If the boot now works, use a process of elimination to find the bad Service. If the boot still fails, a process of elimination on the Boot.ini, Win.ini, and systym.ini files.

Good Luck.

Jerry

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It could be a hardware problem or a software problem. The safest method is to take the disk out and clone / copy it before doing anything else – backup is king.
Then you can put the hard disk back in and re-load Windows to make sure the software is OK. If that doesn’t work it is likely to be hardware or even the BIOS. Try resetting the BIOS to default settings.
If you still have no joy it may be worth getting a diagnostics disk / program from the manufacturer and running that.

cheers, Paul

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I have stumbled onto the cause (but not the reason) of the original slowdown. it is related to the card reader.

After getting UBCD4Win and copying off all the desired files and backing up settings, I then reformatted and loaded windows (note: learned that some windows keys are tied to particular sp release disks) in loading all the various drivers I discovered that when I removed the flash card from the reader the system started pausing as it originally did. As soon as I re-inserted the card it reverted to normal. I then rebooted the system and removed the card and found that the boot slowed down as in my original post until I replaced the flash card, upon which the boot picked up again and completed loading.

Any Ideas?

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What kind of a “flash card” & reader is it and what is the make and model of the laptop?

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The laptop is a Toshiba see here with a multi card reader. I have tried it with an Olympus and an SD card and it does the same with either card

EDIT: Just noticed that the laptop thinks that the card reader is a disk drive

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