I had a working installation of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on a newly built machine. Everything was working fine until a few days ago booting windows started taking a verrrrry long time. It would hang on the screen showing the Windows logo saying Starting Windows for about 4 minutes after which it continues the boot and everything runs normal! It was driving me insane. When I booted into safe mode, the start up would hang on classpnp.sys for 4 mins and then continue. On that same day, I received in the mail a new Intel SSD 160GB hard drive and as I was planning to reinstall the OS on the new drive I didn't worry much about the old installation. Then the saga began! Disconnected the old OS drive and connected the new SSD. Booted Windows 7 installation from DVD. Installation ran fine until it got to Starting Windows screen, then it goes to a blank black screen with a mouse pointer in the middle. The mouse pointer moves with mouse movements but nothing happens beyond that. Cut the long story short. I disconnected everything from the PC, one by one... tested all my RAM (tried each of them individually), swapped my graphics card etc... and it was only until I disconnected all my other hard driver (6 of them connected in a RAID 5) that everything (both the installation on new SSD and the booting from the old drive) worked perfectly again. So I suspect the problem was either a bad SATA cable or a bad HD in my RAID... very strange. Anyway, I hope this info helps someone out there because it took me three days to come to this conclusion. I looked everywhere on the net, others had different problems, but if you are faced with the same problem, check/replace all your SATA cables. Cheers!

lol! Cheers! Ceasar Free Tech

Hi, Thanks for your sharing. This thread you provide can be beneficial to other community members who have the similar questions, the effort you give is very appreciated! Thanks again for the contribution here! Best Regards, Miya YaoThis posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. | Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" on the post that helps you, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Thanks for the information, but unfortunately this did not help me at all. I've also tried updating the BIOS on my MB as suggeted in another thread, AND reseated the BIOS battery, also as suggested in another thread. I am about to try and rebuild the MBR and see if that helps.

I had a bad day with this problem, but fortunately only a day. In researching this issue it's obvious that it can be many things. In my case of a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP2 install on a Supermicro 7045A-CTB server that caused this problem; it turned out that updating the BIOS solved the problem. However it could of been that the act of updating the BIOS brought back the default BIOS settings that helped. Prior to the 'fix' I had removed all USB devices and reseated all connections which had no success. I had also tried replacing the Classpnp.sys file with an earlier version and also removing it with no success. Hopefully there will be a library of fixes barring the real fix from Microsoft. I hope this helps someone going forward.