Laptop freezes on boot

[emil4467]

I have an old Toshiba Satellite laptop A205. I am using it from about 5-6 years but recently it started having problems on startup. When i power on the laptop it doesn't start from the first time. I hear how the cd-rom is turning and then it freezes with black screen showing on the display. Sometimes it passes the black screen and reaches the bios screen and then it freezes on the bios screen loading. I have to power off the laptop and start it again and the second time it boots normally.
It started having this problem recently. What does it mean? Is it something related to the BIOS? I hope it is not a symptom of some serious malfunction coming, because right now i can't afford to buy a new laptop.

 

[Laptop_Nerd]

Hi,

The fact that it freezes in BIOS as well it's an indication that there an issue with the hardware of your laptop. HDD the most common suspect of freezing issue. Remove the HDD from the laptop and boot it up in BIOS, once in BIOS see if it still freezes because if it does it should be the motherboard not the HDD. If it doesn't freeze without the HDD in the laptop you may want to consider replacing the HDD and install a fresh operating system.

 

[emil4467]

Is it possible the cause for the problem to be some of the usb outlets? I have two USB 2.0 ports and i have some suspicions that they might be causing the problem but i don't know how to prove it or what test to run to see if they are the reason.

My HDD partitions are encrypted with TrueCrypt but i don't think this can cause this problem.

Also, sometimes my system freezes randomly without any obvious reason and i have to power off the laptop to fix it. I have Windows 7 but in the event logs it doesn't show the reason for the system freezing only "The previous system shutdown was unexpected" event id 6008.

I forget to say that the laptop does not start from the first time only when i leave it powered off for some hours. If i shutdown and start it after few minutes it boots without freezing.

 

[emil4467]

Hi,

The fact that it freezes in BIOS as well it's an indication that there an issue with the hardware of your laptop. HDD the most common suspect of freezing issue. Remove the HDD from the laptop and boot it up in BIOS, once in BIOS see if it still freezes because if it does it should be the motherboard not the HDD. If it doesn't freeze without the HDD in the laptop you may want to consider replacing the HDD and install a fresh operating system.

I think the problem is in the usb ports. The laptop has two usb 2.0 ports and when i unplug the keyboard and the mouse from them it boots normally. But i am not sure how to fix this. The Device Manager doesn't show any problems with the usb drivers.