Extremely slow POST and boot with Gigabyte EX58-UD5 Rev. 1

[DefRef]

The rig in sig is almost 4 years old and has been pretty stable and reliable during its lifetime. However, recently I've noticed that it takes FOREVER to boot up, especially the POST phase. I usually just hibernate the computer when I'm away for the day or weekend and it wakes up quickly, but when I have to restart after an update or something, I've become aware that it's taking an extremely long time to even get thru POST. Here's some rough timings:

0 - 0:15 - Black screen, things whirring, then beep.
0:15 - 1:40 - Monitor comes on to Award Modular BIOS screen listing "EX58-UD5 F13j" and the Main Processor, its clocking, CPUID, etc. None of the Fx keys or Delete to get into Setup respond.
1:40 - 1:50 - The Detecting Devices finally comes up, enumerating the 2 optical and 3 HDs plus IIRC the external USB drives that have always been there.
1:50 - 10:00 - Windows loads, finally after 8 minutes arriving at the desktop and being usable.

I don't think a computer from ANY era should be taking 10 minutes to boot and the loooooooooong Windows load time is probably related to the crap running in the background, so let's ignore that and see if we can come up with a fix for the miserable 80 seconds where the POST screen just sits there doing nothing.

I've checked through the BIOS settings and there's nothing to determine whether there's a RAM self-test or Quick Boot option. Besides, nothing should have changed. I haven't updated the BIOS in years or changed any configurations. Nothing is plugged in differently that I can tell. It used to fire up, take perhaps 10 seconds before it started detecting the drives, and then roll into Windows. I have no idea what it's doing at the start.

Hope someone has a clue and a fix. TIA!

EDIT: I just checked the fragmentation and it's at 0%

 

[Carfax83]

I had that exact same motherboard before I upgraded so I'm familiar with it.

Did you check the LED debug? Crack the case open and let it boot and watch what the LED debug displays and report back.

Something must be causing it to hang, because mine never did that. Also, check to make sure the Delay for HDD setting in the BIOS isn't greater than 3 to 5 seconds. Also, make sure any integrated features you don't need are disabled.

 

[DefRef]

I didn't check debug LED because I couldn't find the manual to lookup codes, but I will. I do know Delay for HDD is set to zero.

One thing that struck me as odd was that the hard drive is set to IDE instead of ACHI. I'm not sure why that's set that way, but I'm concerned about changing it because I've seen something about how it could mess up Windows. Maybe this is unrelated to this situation. I'm tired; been up all night trying to make up for lost work time.

 

[DefRef]

OMFG!!! I was logging my work steps in Tapatalk for the past 90 minutes and when I sent it, it got swallowed by the NSA or something. ARGH!!!

The punchline was that I disabled USB Mass Storage Leagacy Support in BIOS and it got thru the stage (POST code 50) for USB KB & Mouse initialization in 10 seconds, which is normal. I don't know what changed about that, but hopefully that's fixed.

It still takes 8-1/2 minutes to get to a usable state, so things still aren't swell. I need sleep and I'm only going to have about 2-1/2 hours before I'll need to get up. Ugh.

 

[Carfax83]

Using IDE instead of AHCI can definitely impact your performance for the negative, but I'm not sure it could cause such an extended boot up time.

You can switch to AHCI without reinstalling Windows, but it's tricky, so try it at your own risk.

The greatest possibility is that you have bad sectors on your HDD/SSD, so I would definitely run chkdsk. You're going to have to reboot and let Windows do it's thing, which will take a long time since you're on Windows 7.

One of the things I love about Windows 8, is that chkdsk can be done in only a few seconds, as adverse to hours on Windows 7 depending on the size of your drive..

 

[DefRef]

I used the tips in that link to get AHCI running. Had to mess around with the drive order to get it to see the Win7 drive, but it worked. To be safe, I made a FalconFour Ultimate Boot CD to make sure I had a means to get into the Registry to undo any changes that went sideways. (I initially made a USB key version, but with USB Mass Storage disable, it couldn't see it. D'oh! Made a CD that worked.)

After the first reboot, it installed a slew of AHCI and ATA drivers and a couple said a restart was required. Rebooted and it took 5-1/2 minutes to get up, but when I go into Device Manager I see three items listed under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers for ATA Channel 0 and 1, but only one for Channels 2-5, and one of the three has a slam on it and a Code 10 error, "This device cannot start." Tried uninstalling and redetecting them and it failed. Nothing seems to be not working.

HD Tune Pro reports three bad sectors on the main drive. That shouldn't be too bad on a 1.5TB drive that's 4 years old, right? Improved boot speed seems to be due to dumping Avast! AV to go back to MSE.

 

[Carfax83]

It depends on what kind of bad sectors they are. If they are hard bad sectors, then it's an indication that your hard drive is failing and will eventually become unbootable.

If it's a soft bad sector, then it can be repaired. You'll have to run chkdsk though.

Personally, I think you should do a clean install and start over. It's good to do that every so often anyway, and you're probably overdue.

 

[DefRef]

Absolutely not. I've never understood the casual way some people just wipe their systems on a monthly basis. (Same with smartphone ROM fiends who must do nothing with their phones but flash ROMs.) If I'm going to be starting from scratch, I may as well build a new rig with the latest stuff like SSD and a bazillion gigs of RAM. Unfortunately, I'm currently unemployed and other than this weird boot slowness, the rig does what I need it to do well. I'm hoping to get another year out of it. I'll run a chkdsk while I sleep tonight.

 

[Carfax83]

Absolutely not. I've never understood the casual way some people just wipe their systems on a monthly basis. (Same with smartphone ROM fiends who must do nothing with their phones but flash ROMs.) If I'm going to be starting from scratch, I may as well build a new rig with the latest stuff like SSD and a bazillion gigs of RAM. Unfortunately, I'm currently unemployed and other than this weird boot slowness, the rig does what I need it to do well. I'm hoping to get another year out of it. I'll run a chkdsk while I sleep tonight.

Clean installs on a monthly basis is definitely excessive. I do mine once a year personally. Anyway, I hope chkdsk fixes your issues, as I know bad sectors can definitely extend boot time.

 

[DefRef]

I'm too busy just trying to get stuff done, so wiping and reloading on any unnecessary basis doesn't work too well for me. My previous WinXP rig ran 4 years on its one and only OS load and was fine until the day I decommissioned it and I had so many programs installed that the program menu spanned three or four columns wide. It was sick.

 

[DefRef]

Ran the full disk check. Here's the log:

Running: chkdsk.exe /r c:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is DEFREF.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.
Correcting errors in the uppercase file.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

1465135103 KB total disk space.
926772080 KB in 869145 files.
450660 KB in 124134 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
1319475 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
536592888 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
366283775 total allocation units on disk.
134148222 allocation units available on disk.
Unable to obtain a handle to the event log.
=============
I was wondering what the uppercase file thing was about, but apparently it's nothing. Here's what the MSKB says:

When you run the Chkdsk.exe tool on a hard disk that is formatted with the NTFS file system, you may receive the following error message:

Correcting errors in the uppercase file

Note that you can safely ignore this error message.

Boot times now:

:00 - Power on
:18 - Starting Windows splash
:56 - Screen goes blank
3:24 - Screen comes back on to Welcome splash and spinning circle
4:13 - Wallpaper appears
6:00 - Appear to have control, but launching Firefox, etc. takes a couple minutes.

 

[Carfax83]

So you've cut down your boot time a bit, but it's still really bad. On my old system on Windows 7, I booted into Windows in roughly 35 seconds. Switching to Windows 8 and upgrading my computer dropped that down to about 18 seconds, or slightly under.

And I use RAID, so that lengthens my boot time a bit.

It may be that your hard drive is mechanically defective, which cannot be fixed by anyone short of the manufacturer. Also, if there is actual physical damage to your hard drive, you will keep getting bad sectors and the problem will just worsen over time until one day, you won't be able to boot from it.

If I were you, I'd back up all of my data, and get another hard drive, or send the drive back to the manufacturer for a replacement if it's under warranty.

 

[DefRef]

35 seconds? On a mechanical HD or SSD? I've never seen a computer boot that fast short of my MBP which I put a SSD in and that takes ~45 seconds with windows being reopened.

Is there a utility that I can use to check the speed of the drive? Also, how much background crap are you loading, if anything? I've used Soluto to delay starting of some programs, but it's not enough.

EDIT: I downloaded CrystalDiskInfo 5.6.2 and it's showing Caution on three of the HDs - C and F, which are the two Seagate Barracudas from the sig, bought and installed at the time of rig build in Sept. 2009; and E, a 6-8 year old Maxtor that's mostly AV files. What's odd is that the Reallocated Sectors Count is identical for all three drives: Current and Worst = 100; Threshold = 36. However, another graph just shows the 3 reallocated sectors I saw elsewhere. Also, other drives have higher counts, but no flag.

 

[Carfax83]

That was on two 600GB Raptors in RAID 0, with Norton Internet Security, Intel Rapid Storage driver, Creative audio driver and my Logitech Keyboard app loading. . You can check your boot time using the event viewer.

Here's a guide

Taking over a minute is definitely abnormal, even for Windows 7.. Yeah, after running CrystalDiskInfo, it's obvious your hard drives are malfunctioning. You definitely need to start to back up your files.....immediately. Don't delay, because you never know what might happen.

 

[DominionSeraph]

35 seconds? On a mechanical HD or SSD? I've never seen a computer boot that fast short of my MBP which I put a SSD in and that takes ~45 seconds with windows being reopened.

This was my Dell E521. Had it since 2006. 50MB/s 80GB hard drive. Boot was ~25 seconds from BIOS to a usable desktop.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrFYx5FEZtE

Going to an X4 945 cut a little off it. Same drive.

If your BIOS is still taking forever to detect your drives, I'd pull them and add 'em back one at a time to find out which is hanging. A loose/bad cable can also cause you to hang at detection.

 

[DefRef]

Using that guide, I've only got Event ID 100 issue from this year and it was on 1/2/2013 with a boot time of 65 seconds. However, changing the selection to Critical shows a slew of warnings of 210-375 second (3-1/2 to 6-1/2 minute) boot times. OFFS. [bangs head on desk]

Would it work to get a new pair of drives and do a clone of these Seagates which are going south. The 3rd drive doesn't have any programs that I'm aware of, so I could just move all the data to an external of storge. Man, I don't want to have to spend money I'd rather not, but this is important.

Data backup with these massive drives is such a pain because how do you back up so much data and then how long will the backup drives last? Seems like any external drive you pick will have user reviews bemoaning how they lost all their data.

 

[DefRef]

@DominionSeraph - After disabling USB mass storage in BIOS, it was only taking 15 seconds to get thru POST into loading Windows.

I just ran CrystalDiskMark and the Sequential Read/Write speeds are 86MB/s and 70.76MB/s. However, the 4K random read/write speeds which this guide says are important for boot speed are 0.227MB/s and .0377MB/s. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh....that's not good, is it?

 

[Carfax83]

Data backup with these massive drives is such a pain because how do you back up so much data and then how long will the backup drives last? Seems like any external drive you pick will have user reviews bemoaning how they lost all their data.

I personally have never tried cloning software before, so I can't give you any useful advice on that front.

I back up my data using the old way, which is with external hard drives, and big USB pen drives.

If you want my experience, I've had good luck with externals, but all the same, I use three of them to make sure that if one goes bad, I have something else to fall back on.

I only ever use them for back up as well, so 99% of the time they are not even plugged in. Pen drives are another matter. To me they are not reliable, since they use EEPROM and anything could cause them to malfunction.

Another option is ONLINE back up, but I'm not sure I would trust my data to be on someone's server..

 

[DefRef]

I used to work in IT and did a few bit-for-bit backups. I also cloned my MBP's HD onto the SSD and it was fine.

My externals are on 24/7 when the computer is up, but I don't run much off them - i.e. no programs are installed. They're just archives of movies, etc. at the ready. It's not very convenient to unplug them from the back and store them.

I've had so many key drives just die, I can't count. (OK, it's probably 3-6 over 10 years, but whatever.) They are used less and less by me now that cloud services like Dropbox and Copy are out there, which I use for document storage/sync across all my computers.

Sigh...

 

[Wall Street]

I have had a similar problem with a 1st gen core i series system. Try these:

1) Clear CMOS

or

2) Turn off PC, unplug from wall (or flip switch on PSU), wait 30 seconds, replug computer and restart.

Somehow, there can be a bug where the internal timer in the system runs at a fraction of the real time speed, and this makes the boot take FOREVER. Symptoms go away once Windows starts and clock functionality is turned over the the HPET or other system clock.

Of course you could be facing a completely different issue, however I doubt it is the HDD... Can you run memtest for us?

EDIT: I want to stress that if it takes to 1:40 for the BIOS to get through, it is NOT a HDD error!!!!! You need to check for RAM or BIOS settings/corruption problems.

 

[DominionSeraph]

I just ran CrystalDiskMark and the Sequential Read/Write speeds are 86MB/s and 70.76MB/s. However, the 4K random read/write speeds which [l=http://www.buildcomputers.net/hard-drive-benchmark.html]this guide[/l] says are important for boot speed are 0.227MB/s and .0377MB/s. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh....that's not good, is it?

No. The read is around half of what it should be, and the write should be something like 20 times faster than that.

 

[DefRef]

@Wall Street - If you'd read the whole thread, you would've seen that there was one setting that was stalling the BIOS phase forever. It now takes only 15-20 to POST and detect drives and then start booting Windows. The problem is that takes over 5 minutes.

 

[DefRef]

Status update/new problem:

I picked up a 2TB Toshiba hard drive and am currently using a Macrium Reflect Free to do an Intelligent Sector clone of the C: drive. I'm leaning toward consolidating most of the data from the 2nd Seagate (mostly photos which are also on an external drive and my 400GB Steam folder) onto the new big drive, but that's TBD.

When I connected the new drive to the mobo's #7 SATA port, the AHCI disk detection showed the previous four drives (I also have old WD and Maxtor drives with data on them, not listed in rig sig) and then kicked to another screen where it showed the new Toshiba before booting into Windows. When I first tried to run Reflect, it didn't see the new drive as an option. I went into Disk Management and Device Manager and it wasn't there.

Booting back into BIOS, I looked under the HD Boot Priority menu and the first 4 drives listed were the previously installed drives then the Tosh. However, while the others had a prefix like P1, P2, etc in front, the Tosh had nothing. Playing a hunch, I disconnected the optical drives from the last two blue sockets (SATA 2_4 and 2_5 according to the manual) according to the menu and plugged them into the first two white sockets (GSATA 2_0 and 2_1). After saving and rebooting, the detection phase now showed a single optical drive on that secondary screen and all five HDs in the first.

Going into Windows and Reflect, I was able to see the new drive and Windows reported it installed; the cloning process is underway. But, you guessed it, neither DVD drive is showing in Explorer or Device Manager. It appears that the secondary disk controller - the Gigabyte one, not the ICH10R - isn't active/working/something. This makes me wonder now WTF that red SATA cable that's in the last white port (GSATA 2_2) is connected to if the four HDs and the DVDs were in the first six blue sockets.

Now I guess when the clone is done and I've verified I can boot off that drive I could merely swap it into the failing C: drives caddy and get on with things and move the DVDs back to their original slots, but that doesn't explain why only 6 of the mobo's 10 SATA ports are running. Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[DefRef]

OK, good news, not so good news, with a couple of D'OH!!! items thrown in:

First, drive clone completed in 3:50. Ugh. It would've gone faster, I'll bet, if something I'll explain in a moment had been done before.

The problem with the DVD drives not being seen was due to the Gigabyte SATA driver not being loaded. Why not? Why would I have since there was nothing connected to it before. I'd dug into the BIOS and saw they were showing, so it was quick logic that perhaps it needed some driver TLC. After the reboot, the optical drives are back in the game.

Yay, right? Not really. Booting is still over 5 minutes long. It gets worse: I was looking at the long list of Serial ATA devices that I mentioned in post #6 and after having loaded the GSATA drivers, I wondered if something else was missing in the driver dept. and so I DL and run the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology drivers and after another slow reboot, it came up and detected all the HDs and said it needed another restart and after another five minutes it came back up and now there is only a single item for ATA Channel 0 and 1, Intel(R) ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller and Standard Deal Channel PCI IDE Controller listed under the IDA ATA/ATAPI controllers section. Why weren't the drivers loaded? A: I wasn't running AHCI until the other day and never thought about it. I shudder to think how fast the clone could've gone if I'd had the correct fraking drivers loaded.

This leaves the still slow boot speeds to contend with. I ran CrystalDiskMark on the new Toshiba drive, 3 passes of 1000MB and the Read [MB/s] and Write [MB/s] results are:

Sequential - 112.5 / 89.98
512K Random - 14.68 / 34.79
4K Random, Queue Depth=1 - 0.272 (66.5 IOPS) / 0.680 (166 IOPS)
4K Random, Queue Depth=32 - 0.637 (155.5 IOPS) / 0.647 (158 IOPS)

I don't know how to interpret these numbers. They seem hella better than before (Sequential Read/Write speeds were 86MB/s and 70.76MB/s. 4K random, Q=1 read/write were 0.227MB/s and .0377MB/s) but someone will have to tell me if they actually are.

Which leaves the slow boot issue. After all the drivers were hammered into place, here's the boot times:

:00 - Power on
:20 - Starting Windows splash (was :18, but now there's the 2nd SATA reading)
1:02 - Screen goes blank (sleep mode) and USB keyboard backlight goes off (was :56)
2:49 - Screen comes back on after keyboard lights back up to Welcome splash and spinning circle (was 3:24)
5:00-5:30 - Appear to have control (was 6:00)

Now what? TIA.

 

[DominionSeraph]

My new 1TB:

Sequential Read : 190.419 MB/s
Sequential Write : 184.825 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 53.925 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 89.275 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.583 MB/s [ 142.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.070 MB/s [ 261.3 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.746 MB/s [ 426.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.950 MB/s [ 232.1 IOPS]

Test : 500 MB [F: 10.6% (77.3/731.4 GB)] (x1)
Date : 2013/07/10 5:51:50
OS : Windows XP Professional SP3 [5.1 Build 2600] (x86)


My old 80GB WD800JD hosting Windows:

Sequential Read : 56.405 MB/s
Sequential Write : 53.873 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 27.531 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 31.544 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.412 MB/s [ 100.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.183 MB/s [ 288.8 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.573 MB/s [ 139.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.194 MB/s [ 291.5 IOPS]

Test : 500 MB [D: 6.7% (4.3/64.5 GB)] (x1)

So you're in the ballpark.

Anyway, why don't you try an in-place reinstall of windows?
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how-tos/how_repair_faulty_windows_installation_without_reformatting
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