re: Question about 'Things that slow down system bootup'
Friday, February 21, 2003 at 6:15 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Rich P.
(6 messages posted)
It's funny how time and patience cures all problems. I built another new system
as an upgrade for me to play games on. I ended up re-using parts from other systems
and one of those pieces was the hard drive that I threw into my wife's computer.
The system I ended up building is as follows:
Intel P4 2.53 gHz CPU
1024 MB PC1200 DDR Ram
Nvidia Ti4400 128 meg DDR AGP 4x video card
ASUS P4S8X motherboard
that same 60 gig hard drive.
I bought a new copy of Windows XP Pro from the store I bought my motherboard from
and it happened to have SP1 integrated.
After the first reboot my computer would take 10 - 15 minutes to boot. I thought
to myself, this is stupid. Not being one to give up and working in the technical
field, I decided to do some troubleshooting. I followed all of the online advice
and pretty much turned off every option in the BIOS. No go.
With nothing to lose I decided to give MS .net server 2003 RC2 a try, since I
have a copy for evaluation. It's basically Windows XP in server form. Once my hard
drive was formatted and .net server was at it's first reboot, the same frustrating
thing happened. Slow boot, taking 10-15 minutes to boot. At this point, I decided
to retry WinXP Pro and see if I could figure out the problem.
So I decided to break down and call Microsoft and ask them for help. Being an
installation problem, MS is obligated to give you two, free, service calls. Once
I talked to the tier-one support, they gave me a support number and bumped me up
to tier-two. Tier-two asked me all of the things I had tried and even asked me to
try some other options, still no go. The tech guy mentioned that since my problem
followed me even in safe-mode that it had to be a low-level driver and something
associated with the motherboard. We thought it might be the USB drivers since I
never once saw the USB drivers load in the /SOS setting (Show On Startup) or in my
"ntbtlog.txt" boot-log. But it could also be the IDE drivers. At this point, being
a Saturday, the tier-two tech told me he was elevating my problem to their special
investigation team, who would call me back by Tuesday.
In the meantime, On Monday, I saw an ad for a 120-gig 7200 RPM hard drive on sale
for $99 at Comp-USA. With all of the games I play I decided to go ahead and give
it a try. The drive is a Maxtor 7200RPM 120-gig drive with 2mb cache and even had
the WinXP logo on it. Amazingly, the drive installed, formatted, and run's through
reboots flawlessly. NO SLOWDOWN of any kind. Microsoft called me that evening and
I told them about the "fix" I found and the tech said he was perplexed by all of
the data I had submitted. He even said this was the first report MS had of this
kind that was not using the Intel chipset. My ASUS mobo uses the SIS-648 chipset
and my AMD system has the VIA chipset, so this indicates cross-platform corruption
of some kind.
In my opinion this points to a problem of some kind with the EIDE drivers that come
with the SP1 fix. It's pretty sad that I had to buy a new hard drive to fix my problem,
but I did get a higher-capacity, faster hard drive. The two 60-gig drives I tried
to use are both UDMA5. The only possibility I can think of would be that there was
some timing problem since UDMA5 is ATA/100 and my boards are all 266 mHz boards with
PC2100 RAM or PC133 RAM, and since 100 is not an even multiple, I wonder if there
isn't some kind of corruption in MS's SP1 drivers. The MS tech told me this was
a remote possibility and suggested if I wanted to try again that I could install
SP1 and then force the older EIDE drivers to be installed and see if that fixed the
problem.
Now that I have my system up and running, I'm not going to try again, but I might
on my wife's computer. You might try it yourself. Good luck and I hope this helps!
Rich.
On Friday, January 10, 2003 at 4:49 am, Rich wrote:
>I have a question about Things
>that slow down system bootup:
>
>I have a "brand new" system that I am throwing together for my wife. The system
consists
>of:
>
>AMD 1333 mHz Athlon Thunderbird CPU
>
>Iwill KK-266 motherboard
>256 megabyte PC-133 SDRAM
>IBM Deskstar 60-gig 7200 RPM Hard drive
>AGP 4x MX440 64-meg video card
>
>Philips PSC605 sound card
>
>I am formatting the HD as a full 60-gig partition and installing Windows XP Professional
>from scratch. I have installed Nvidia's latest all-in-one video drivers (version
>41.09) as well as the sound card drivers that came on CD. Here's my dilemma - Everything
>works great with the computer and boot time from power-off to full-up windows is
>about 21 seconds (according to BootVis). Once I install Service Pack 1, my boot
time
>takes about 5 minutes. The strange thing is that BootVis still reports less than
>30 seconds to boot. Yet on start-up, once POST has occurred, I see a black screen
>for about a minute-thirty, then I see the black screen with the white status-bar
>across the bottom for another two to three minutes, and eventually the slider reaches
>the right-hand side of the screen and I momentarily see the WinXP welcome splash
>screen for an add'l thirty seconds. Once I'm into Windows, everything works fine,
>functions fine. I've even attempted a safe-boot and I see the identical symptoms
>with the exception that I can see what system files/drivers are loading, but they
>are excruciatingly/irritatingly slow. I've searched the web a bit and found one
"article"
>asking for opinions on SP1 when it was released and I saw many complaints about
SP1
>causing a slow-down, but I have not seen anyone fully address the issue with some
>sort of solution. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. I don't want to run the
>system without SP1, unless I have to, and I would rather not go back to Windows
2000.
>
>
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 |  | re: Question about 'Things that slow down system bootup' (Rich P.: Fri, Feb 21, 2003, 6:15 pm) |
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