Is this a mobo, hd, mem or software problem?

[Healey]

I have a serious problem that just started on our main computer.

XP
Amd Athalon
524meg
120 gig HD, ntfs
XP pro

When I boot up, it takes forever to fire up.

The it goes through the memory check, then lists the HD and CDs, everything appears fine, but then it just sits there for 5 minutes or so.

After what seems like forever it continues and starts to load Windows. The XP logo splash screen comes up, and then a black screen, nothing. This is for about a minute or so. Then Windows continues loading eventually coming up and operating fine.

The long pause before the XP splash screen is very strange.

Search & Destroy, AdAware & MS AntiSpyware all find nothing wrong. AVG shows all is well.

When I run a HD test it comes up clean with one exception, a ?Reallocated Sector Count.? It shows ?Current: 199, Worst: 199, Threshold: 140, Data: 1, FAILED?

From what I can find this is a warning that my main HD is suffering from some physical defect. Although when I run a surface scan it is all green, good.

Could that be the source of the slow boot? If so, is there a work around?

Any other ideas as to where I can look to find out why I suddenly started experiences the long, long delays in loading up?

 

[Geomagick]

I had a similar although not identical problem a few years ago. I was running a RAID 1 setup and a few weeks of this sort of thing happening one of the disks failed. I didn't lose any data becuase of using RAID but I would certainly do a complete backup of all your important data.

 

[Healey]

I've cloned the HD and am also doing constant data back-ups, just in case.

A strange thing is that once XP does load, everything seems fine.

Why would a HD problem cause a delay in the boot sequence box appearing? I would think that points to a mobo or bios problem, but I'm ceratinly not sure of that.

 

[Geomagick]

If you've already cloned the disk have you tried using the new disk in place of the old one. If the defect goes away then you have proven theat the disk was at fault.

 

[Healey]

Okay, it gets more strange...

So unplug everything and place the box on my desk, open it and clear out the dust. Plug in ac, monitor, and keyboard. It fires right up!

Put it back, plug everything in and try fire it up. Same problem, it stalls for several minutes aftert bios lists drives.

So I unplugged the various cords and came to the conclusion that there are 4 usb ports on the back of the mobo, a Ecs k7s5a, and it looks like I can plug in any of my usb hubs into one of the ports and things work fine, but if I plus into an of the other three ports I get the delay. After xp is running I can use all usb ports without problems.

Any ideas?

 

[d3lt4]

maybe just those ports are dying. I would just use the other ports if that works fine.

 

[trevelynzx]

hey bro -- since you mentioned the USB ports, try keeping them all unplugged while you fire up the computer. my laptop refuses to get past the boot-up screen with an ipod plugged into a USB port, so maybe you're having a similar issue. good luck.

 

[pkrush]

All of the USB eventually died on my K7S5A (and the audio, and the ethernet, and 3 of the PCI slots... I am so glad I finally got rid of it). I'd recommend that you get a USB2 PCI card or perhaps a new motherboard. You could probably get a Sempron 64 , 512 megs of RAM, and a new motherboard for about $200 and it will definitely perform a lot better.