What causes Windows Boot to stall?

Question

For about 6 months now I have been having this weird problem where Windows 7 fails to fully boot correctly. What happens is this.

Starting Windows shows up on the screen.
Then 3 out of 4 times nothing else happens, no Windows Flag animation, just nothing occurs.
After 3 or 4 restarts repeating steps 1-2 above, the Windows Flag animation finally shows up and everything works as expected.

Windows Booting

My question is what is causing this problem in steps 1 and 2? Because I have tried the following with no luck:

My setup is as follows:

Other than what I have tried above I am totally out of ideas and looking for some new ones to try.

If you have another HDD laying around try putting that in and installing Windows on it. I know the hard drives are very easy to change on the Latitude e series and this will eliminate the SSD as a problem...
I had the slave/master jumpers set incorrectly on an old Dell desktop and it caused the Windows 7 boot process to hang at this point.
As the Unit is able to complete a boot occasionally, try entering the F8 diagnostic boot options and selecting boot logging, this will generate a boot log and you can check the last few entries for service that failed to load or attempted to load but never report back as successful. Find the offending service or driver and report back. this will help us narrow the issue down. Given the issue is intermittent it's possible it's a hardware issue but more likely a timing issue where services or drivers that rely on each other are simply running out of resources causing some not to load in time.

Moab · Answer 1 · 2011-02-21 16:27:50Z

Enable Boot logging using Process Monitor from Microsoft, then sort through the log to find where it hangs and a possible culprit.

1 Answer