Every now and then, not horribly often, when booting up GG's desktop we immediately receive a black screen with the message that says exactly this: Error Sending End of Post message to ME, System HALT!

I give it the hard kill by holding the power button in and reboot. The reboot always works, it never does this to us twice in a row.

Any idea what is going on? Her system is a 4-year old Dell running Windows7 Pro.
Thanks much,
Acadia

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The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution. -- Emerson

That error usually means that there was a POST (Power On Self Test) error involving hardware. It could be an intermittent failure of a device or just that a device did not start up quick enough.

Do you ever see an ASM ME alert for a brief time before the halt message?

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Interesting. This message appears very quickly and I have never seen an ASM ME alert, whatever that looks like, unless I have always missed it. Devices, hmmmm. She has 4 external hard drives. Could one of them be causing it? She need those drives to backup all of her photography.
Thanks, Jay,
Acadia

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The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution. -- Emerson

Actually I didn't expect you to have seen an ASM ME (Auto Snapshot Manager Microsoft Edition) as it would indicate the possibility of a low level (before Windows loads) infection.

I Suppose that it could be one of the externals not coming up to speed fast enough or it could be any other hardware not initializing before it is polled by POST.

Since this is intermittent it will be VERY difficult to track down the exact cause. To be safe I would run diagnostics on all the drives both internal and external along with doing a memory test. Other than that I'd consider it a gremlin that could takes literally months to track down due to the intermittent nature.

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Acadia, if you Google your error message "Error Sending End of Post message to ME, System HALT!", you will find many websites dealing with this issue. I didn't understand all the solutions, but one did seem reasonable. Like you, one user had many external drives attached to his computer. It was suggested that if most or all of these external drives draw power through a USB port instead of a wall plugin, then perhaps the USB ports are not powering up fast enough.

Just curious, are your 4 external drives powered via USB or wall plugs (I have both)?

Other users got this message when they tried to use a wireless mouse and keyboard. But if they removed the USB receiver and used a wired mouse and keyboard, they did not get the message.

I don't know for certain, but it just might be caused by your USB devices? Like Jay said.....could be a hardware problem.

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