Resolved Hanging on POST

Hi all!

So the other night I was watching some south park on my computer and was getting a tad restless, so I stretched my legs out and accidentally hit the power plug for my PC, the actual socket became loose and needless to say my PC shutdown. I thought nothing of it, it started back up normally but was taking painfully long to load windows, so I force restarted my computer. Now whenever I shutdown my computer it hangs on POST. Is this a hardware issue? how can I figure out what piece of hardware is causing the problem? Would this have been the fault of not shutting the PC down properly?

Thanks for any help!

 

Welcome to BBS,

That sudden power loss has probably just corrupted a few system files. I would run the system restore by following this link.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/features/system-restore.aspx

 

That actually worked perfectly, thanks alot! From what I had read everyone was saying that if your computer hangs on POST then it is a hardware issue, but indeed you were right. Thanks!!

 

I am glad you got your system going but just to clarify, note POST, which stands for Power On Self Test, occurs during the initial stages of the hardware's boot process BEFORE the hard drives (and consequently, the operating system) are touched. Once the POST completes satisfactorily, then, and only then does the boot process move on to the rest of the BIOS CMOS information, which is where the system learns the location of the boot drive in order to load the OS. You don't need any drives connected to complete POST.

If a computer hangs during POST, you would not be able to access System Restore, which is on the boot drive. This is why your initial assumption that POST failures normally indicate a hardware issue is true - but in this case, not your problem. Corrupt system files were your problem.

Since apparently you were able to access System Restore, this means POST completed satisfactorily and the boot process was able to continue to boot (at least partially) the OS from the drive. And from there, System Restore was [fortunately] able to take you back to an uncorrupted configuration.

I trust you have re-routed your cables to prevent this from happening again. Next time, you may not be so lucky and System Restore may not save you, forcing a system repair or a complete reinstall.

 

Oh right, so, just to clarify, the motherboard splash screen, where you are able to enter BIOS, is this where POST occurs?

 

Actually, you don't enter the BIOS. You enter the BIOS Setup Menu and you do that AFTER the POST has completed.