2K freezes at boot.....

This pc was reformatted with Win2K clean install. It freezes on a boot when the pc was shutdown for an hour or more. When powered down after the freeze, it will boot fine. The event viewer shows no errors. I thought it was the network locking up the pc however, I've replaced the NIC with a brand new one, and in a different PCI slot too. It still freezes at boot. Installed SpyBot S&D, Norton A/V and SpySweeper. All clean scans. Any ideas that I may have missed?

I need to add exactly where the pc freezes---at the Win2K Pro screen. (where the o/s is loading....?.....I think.....)

 

The W2K screen with the blue progress bar is where the hardware is initialized. If it froze at the end of this screen as it tries to boot to a blank desktop before the icons appear, this would possibly indicate a problem with the graphics card as it switches from VGA mode (low resolution BIOS and previous mentioned W2K boot screen) to SVGA desktop environment mode. Updated graphics drivers usually help. If updating the graphics drivers doesn't help then I'd suggest first booting with minimal hardware installed. Go with only the graphics card, mouse, keyboard and monitor connected. Remove all other internal cards (including the NIC) and external devices.

Source updated drivers for all your cards, motherboard and devices and install one by one checking for the boot freeze problem. If one of these updates fixes the problem, I'd still complete the driver update of other hardware.
NIC, Audio and Graphic card drivers are prime candidates your problem.

HTH

 

Hardware Problems

Turns out to be hdd defective/damaged. Replaced, reinstalled o/s. System up and running.

 

You just never know what it can be sometimes?

Thanks for the post back Suzette.