PC won't restart

[LinktheDeme]

Well as the title says my PC won't properly restart. I just bought a new hard drive and put the drivers on it but now it won't properly restart at all. When I hit turn off or restart through windows it'll close everything and only my background and my mouse will be there just chilling until I have to forcefully hit the power button on my laptop. Anyone know why? D:

[Cheerios]

List your other hardware and specific version of Windows.

When you get a new hard drive, it just gets formatted through Windows and is set up with default drivers. There's no need to find additional ones for it, unless you meant you put drivers for other hardware onto your hard drive.

[LinktheDeme]

List your other hardware and specific version of Windows.

When you get a new hard drive, it just gets formatted through Windows and is set up with default drivers. There's no need to find additional ones for it, unless you meant you put drivers for other hardware onto your hard drive.

Yea video, sound, and etc

Tried to do the bios upgrade one too and that one wouldn't work because it won't restart

what do you mean by other hardware? Where would I find zee list? My version of windows is XP home.

[Cheerios]

Motherboard, video card, sound card, etc.

You can do a BIOS upgrade without restarting if you just force-shutdown by holding the power button for a few seconds. Your PC will start back up when you want it to.

If you unplug the hard drive and just use BIOS, will your PC restart properly?

If you use your old hard drive, if possible, will your PC restart properly?

[LinktheDeme]

Motherboard, video card, sound card, etc.

You can do a BIOS upgrade without restarting if you just force-shutdown by holding the power button for a few seconds. Your PC will start back up when you want it to.

If you unplug the hard drive and just use BIOS, will your PC restart properly?

If you use your old hard drive, if possible, will your PC restart properly?

It starts up fine the only thing is when I hit shut down or restart from start then it'll just hang at my desktop image with what seems like all processes are closed.

When I do log off first and then shut down from that screen it appears to be working fine.

OS is Windows XP home Edition (5.1 Build 2600)

Processor is Intel(R) CPU T2400 @ 1.83Ghz(2CPUS)

Memory 2046 RAM
Video: ATI Mobility Radeon X1400
Sound: SigmaTel Audio

Was working fine on old hard drive.

When I try to do the BIOS driver update file that I got from Dell's website thats compatible with my laptop I hit the continue button and everything it starts to auto restart and etc then it will just hang where it normally does when I try to restart or shut down directly through windows. Then when I force close and start it by holding the button down it doesn't update. Also I don't think my windows updates are working because of this as well ;/

My old hard drive shut down and started up from windows fine

[Cheerios]

I'd probably say formatting the new one will be used as your last option, but there are others to use.

If your old hard drive has the same hardware drivers for everything else except the hard drive itself, then I'm not too sure what else could be causing the problem. My old Windows XP home Installation did that before, where it'd just show my desktop background and no taskbar/anything, even though I told it to restart/shutdown. Same shit plagued Windows 98, too.

You said you have a Laptop, so maybe with your new hard drive it has some bad power option setting. You can try to go to control panel - power options - power schemes and change it to portable/laptop, or if it's already set to that, change it to something else. Also, you can try making sure nothing else is plugged into your PC besides mouse/monitor/keyboard.

[Kenshiin]

I have a dell desktop and I had a similar problem where it would hang up at the end of restarts and it forced me to hold down the power button to turn it off. I'm pretty sure it happened when I tried to download the newest bios drivers from the dell website. After having to reinstall the OS because of blue screen errors the problem is gone.

[The Stig]

If the mouse and background is just chilling, have you tried bringing up the task manager to see what is still running (could indicate something having trouble closing)?