How to diagnose startup problem?

Twice in the last fortnight, my few week old computer has failed to startup, giving me the option to do a startup repair, which has been successful on both occasions.

Is there some way of finding out what caused the problem?

run error checking on your C: drive.

Thanks for the reply.

I'll give that a go, but after the startup repair, wouldn't any errors have been fixed?

Edit: Scan completed - no errors

Scan complete...you mean the chkdsk /f?

No, I did the check under Properties>Tools. Is chkdsk /f more thorough? I assume I run this from an MSDOS window.

Edit: Just read the chkdsk tutorial (should have done that before!) and realised that I should have had 'automatically fix errors' selected. I didn't as I mistakenly thought that errors would be fixed without being told what they were. Will do chkdsk properly when I get home.

Keep us posted....and if this has already happened twice I would *seriously* consider exchanging it for another computer - this should not be happening so fast, and portends possible problems in the future....

/r is repair mode and includes /f.

You could clear the event viewer and reboot. Right click on each category in event viewer and clear. Don't save the old events.

Once you restart, you only get the errors on startup.

I ran chkdsk so that it was performed at boot. Left it to it and when I returned 5-10 minutes later it was at the login screen. Should I have sat watching to see any errors reported, or do these get reported in the event viewer?
johngalt - do you have some feeling for what might be causing the problem?

not really a feeling, but a concern - if the computer is that new, something is not working correctly - whether it is another program messing with your boot settings, a problem with your hardware, or something else, though, is too early to tell at this juncture.

At one point I rebooted last night and it would only get to the Dell splash screen. At this point it powered down immediately when I pressed the on/off button, rather than having to hold it for 4 seconds. Does this suggest that it hadn't even got through the BIOS? The only way to get it to boot was to cycle the power at the mains socket, then it booted normally.
It never entered startup repair as it has done on the previous couple of occasions, but I did get a quick glimpse of a message which said something about checkpoint and C:.

do you use checkpoint software?