Help! hanging on boot

[sjek]

systems been working fine but trying to boot this morning...

mobo: xfx 680i LT

hangs at xfx logo for 5-10mins

then hangs at del/F1 options for 10minutes

then it tells me it's in safe mode and to reset system clocks

my E7200 was Oc'd but stable for 6months

I reset the clocks to stock and rebooted - same again, hang at logo, hang at del/F1

then hangs, looking for boot devices, another 10minutes

then hangs at 'Starting....' for 20mins+

then it dumped me to dell diagnostics, telling me I wasnt running a dell machine so it restarted.

re; the dell error - my HDD used to have an OEM copy of XP, from dell. I upgraded to vista, obviously a dell recovery partition is still there.

What could cause my boot to go so slowly?

The only change I made was to install audio drivers last night (from XFX support) as my mic wasnt working very well.

Any ideas?

 

[nathan]

from what you have said above, it sounds like your hard drive had gone. Try unplugging your hard drive and see if it gets through the bios alot quicker.

 

[Dav0s]

i agree with nathan, but if that fails, have you got any usb devices plugged in? try unplugging them.

 

[sjek]

sorry, should have said, I tried w/o hardrives.

Would resetting CMOS work/help?

thanks for the replies

 

[Youngie1337]

sorry, should have said, I tried w/o hardrives.

Would resetting CMOS work/help?

thanks for the replies

Worth a try matey.

 

[sjek]

Well, its booting at normal speed now but when I get to GRUB (a multiboot menu for non-linux users) all my linux partitions give me 'error 22: partition does not seem to exist' and the vista options dumps me to the useless dell recovery program.

I'm not sure if the HDD is dead or my MBR/partition table has been borked.

If I fix it, I'm renaming the HDD Lazerus.

 

[sjek]

Well, its booting at normal speed now but when I get to GRUB (a multiboot menu for non-linux users) all my linux partitions give me 'error 22: partition does not seem to exist' and the vista options dumps me to the useless dell recovery program.

I'm not sure if the HDD is dead or my MBR/partition table has been borked.

If I fix it, I'm renaming the HDD Lazerus.

 

[Dav0s]

try a linux live cd and see if you can access hdd that way.