Windows 7 Windows consistently freezing after power outage

[krexiar]

I have been having a serious issue with my PC. The PC will boot up without incident, but if I try to access explorer or the OS, it will slow to a crawl and eventually freeze. I have encountered this with firefox, the start menu, and when trying to access the task manager. The problem is consistent, occuring everytime I start the machine. Usually within the first few minutes of a boot-up, Windows has frozen and I must force a hard reset.

The only thing I can think of which may be the cause is a power outage which occured in the night. When I woke up, the PC was off and the problem began as soon as I booted up. The PC was plugged into a power strip which was not tripped by the outage.

I can boot up in Safe Mode, which delays the onset of the crash, but doesn't stop it. I have tried using system restore by accessing the menu during start-up (F8) but the system restore always fails at the very end. Looking at the inside of the PC, there doesn't seem to be any visible damage (that I can detect) and at no points does anything seem to be giving off any excess heat.

When I press CTRL+ALT+DEL in an attempt to access the task manager, the screen goes black and the cursor turns to a wheel. After several minutes, the wheel will stop and a prompt will appear stating "The logon process was unable to display security and logon options when CTRL+ALT+DELETE was pressed. If the operating system does not respond, press ESC or restart the computer by using the power switch."

Any good guesses what could be the cause of all this? I haven't had much look scouring the web for answers.

 

[helpifIcan]

Try sfc /scannow

 

[krexiar]

Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.

Try sfc /scannow

 

[Drew]

Test the P/S or have it tested or try things w/ a new one. I would suggest it & or the M/B have suffered damage following the power outage.

Drew

 

[Saltgrass]

Sounds like it is trying to access something. You might try running chkdsk. But as Drew says, if the outage happed at a bad time, some type of hard drive damage may have been done or some files were corrupted because it was asleep or hibernating. If it was something like a power surge from an electrical storm it may be different...

 

[krexiar]

Everything else connected to the power strip seems to be working properly, including a PS3. Again, the surge protector did not trip and only the PC seems to have sustained any damage (if it is the cause). I ran a chkdsk, but I'm not terribly familiar with what I'm looking for. After running the scan on my d: drive, the final report reads: "4096 bytes in each allocation unit. 241185272 total allocation units on disk. 119355042 allocation units available on disk. Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50." Does this mean anything notable? I'd also like to appologizing for the formatting on these messages. This forum and my laptop do not seem to agree on simple formatting commands.

 

[krexiar]

I should also mention the computer was more than likely in sleep mode when the power outage occurred, if that makes any supposed difference