Curious Win 7 start/boot issue, seems DVD drive related

[Populist_Prole]

Fairly new HP desktop PC ( 1 year old ) but the issue existed for the past several months. It took me awhile to connect some dots but I'm fairly certain it's a CD/DVD drive issue. It would happen every several boots.

Here it is:

Push the power button on the PC, several seconds elapse and the monitor powers up but stays black, and I see a big vertical cursor on the upper left of the otherwise all-black monitor, accompanied by a continuous clunking/clicking sound from the PC ( 2 clunks/second ) and will do this till hell freezes over or until I just hold the power button down for 4 seconds and shut it off. I'll wait a few seconds and hit the power button on again and then it will boot normally, albeit loudly as the optical drive DVD/CD drive spins and emits a slightly raspy hum till the PC is totally up. No issues with the drive's performance when the PC is up.

Now here's the thing. This will ONLY happen if there is a disc of some sort ( game, dvd, music cd ) in the drive. - If their is no disc of any kind in the drive, the PC powers up and windows starts perfectly ( and silently ) every time like a champ.

Is this a hardware or software ( drivers? ) issue? Like I said earlier, it took me quite a while to make the connection between the CD drive loaded or unloaded status and the issue.

Thanks.

[Denzil_DC]

1. At Startup, go into your computer's BIOS settings

How you do that will vary from computer to computer, but basically you need to watch the screen as it starts up, and a message should appear telling you what key to press to enter BIOS (a.k.a. system configuration utility, BIOS setup etc.). You'll need to be quick - if you miss your chance, just reboot and try again.

I'm asking you to do this because I want you to check the boot order. It may be that you've got your PC set to check your DVD drive for a bootable disk first, before checking your C drive. If so, then the answer is to tell it to check the C drive first.

If you need more of a walkthrough, there's one here: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ss/bootorderchange.htm

That may not be the answer to your problem (I'm not clear why it would be an intermittent issue, for one thing), but we'll need to eliminate it as a possibility before trying anything else.

[Populist_Prole]

2. Thanks for your reply and the link

I got into BIOS and selected boot from the hard drive....though it wasn't at all clear to me what way the default already was from looking at the menu.

I've put a disc in and it booted normally. I'll see how it does the next few times and relay my results. Maybe this may help other as well.

[Denzil_DC]

3. So far, so good!

If it plays up again, all I can think of at the moment is that it's possible your hard disk is failing, in which case it might not boot up every time (whch would explain it being an intermittent problem) and the computer would look for another boot up option. Hopefully, that isn't what's wrong. If it is, as long as the hard disk spins up, it should be possible to recover the data, or possibly even clone it onto a new hard disk, but as ever, keeping backups of important data is vital.

[jrandom421]

4. What it's doing

Is checking to see if you have a disk in the drive and to see if it's bootable. It takes some time, and when it finds it's not bootable, it goes to the next device in the boot order to see if it's bootable.

[hobbit709]

5. Simple solution is not to leave a disk in the drive.

Second solution is to change boot order to boot from hard drive first. But if you then ever want to boot from a live or diagnostic disk, you will have to change boot order again.

[Populist_Prole]

6. For whatever reason, that is actually the only thing that works.

And that's fine with me.

I've changed the boot order and thought it was OK, and it was....for awhile. But through exhaustive troubleshooting the only thing that remains an absolute constant is that as long as there is no disc in the drive, there is no problem. At this point I feel that any "cure" is going to be more trouble ( headaches, spending of $$ ) than it's worth. I can live with it.