Long boot for Win2K

[Chubbbs]

Hi, I upgraded my OS from Win98SE to Win2K Pro this week and am having a small problem.  Booting into windows takes an incredibly long time, although I always eventually get a clean desktop at the end.  Also, the boot time is very inconsistant.  Somtimes it stays on the Windows 2000 Professional loading screen for 45 seconds, sometimes at much as 6 minutes.  The only thing I can tell about the pause is that the HDD LED goes solid orange for 15-20 seconds and then off for 15-20 seconds, before turning back on.  This continues for a while until all of a sudden I hear the hard drive reading and the progress bar race to the end, and then I get the desktop.  This is a brand new computer I built a week ago with Win98SE and now am upgrading to 2000.  I had no boot problems in 98, but had significant stability problems that were solved by the OS upgrade.  What could be the matter with my boot process?

 

[Slikkster]

Two things I would look at:

Win2k spends a good amount of time querying hardware before boot. For instance, it will scan all your IDE controller Channels (Primary and Secondary). If you're not using all of these channels, setting them to "None" in Device manager vs. "Auto Detection" will tell Win2K not to even look at that channel and go to the next.

So, for example, if you have one hard drive on Primary IDE Channel Device 0 position and no device on Primary IDE Controller
Channel Device 1 position, set Device 1 position to None vs Auto Detection. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, right-click on your My Computer icon on your desktop and choose Properties. Then, click the Hardware Tab, then, click the Device Manager tab. You should see a listing for "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" Click on that to open it. Now, you should see three entries. The second and third are labled as Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel. Click on Primary. Then, click on Advanced Settings. You'll see "Advanced Settings". You'll see "Device 0" and "Device 1". If you have no second hard drive or cdrom on the Primary IDE controller, set device "1" "Device Type" to "None". If you're using both the Device 0 and Device 1 positions on that controller channel, leave them at Auto Detect. Just make sure both are set to "DMA if Available".

Do the same for the secondary channel. If there's a position there that's not being used, set it to "None". Make sure both are set to "DMA if Available".

Just make a note to yourself, though, that if you ever install an IDE device on one of your motherboard controllers that you've set to "none" in Win2k, you'll never see it detect until you go back and reset it to Auto Detection.

Now, that's one thing to speed up the boot. Another is to stop any unneeded "Services" from running at startup. Here's a good website (there are a few) that walks you through the process of disabling services you would never use:



Tweaking Win2k Services

The article is a few pages long...you have to click the Next button at the bottom of each page to move forward.

 

[Moonbender]

"The article is a few pages long...you have to click the Next button at the bottom of each page to move forward."

Click? With the mouse or what? Please explain!

Chubbs, I don't know about your hardware config, but just in case you've got a RAID controller on board which you don't use, deactivate it in the BIOS. That sped up the booting time for a friend.
However, all those tweaks are just that, tweaks. They all save you a couple of seconds, but if booting sometimes takes you up to 5 minutes or more, then there might be a more serious problem.
Of course, you should try the usual stuff, like updating all drivers (eg. sound, video, chipset, network, possibly mouse, printer etc).

I'm not sure whether there is a diagnostic program, which tells you what exactly happens during booting, and, most importantly, how long it takes for Windows 2000. There is such a thing for Windows 9x, but I've never seen it for Win2k. LoadOrder by SysInternals tells you what is loaded, but unfortunately not how long it takes.

 

[Chubbbs]

Hi, I do havea RAID controller, but I use it.  My IDE setup is as follows:

Primary Master - Creative Ovation 12x DVD
Primary Slave - Empty
Secondary Master - Sony Spressa 8/4/32x CDRW
Secondary Slave - Empty
RAID Primary Master - Maxtor 40 GB, 7200 rpm HDD
All other RAID channels empty

I will try disabling the Primary and Secondary slaves, since I will never use those.  However, I plan to use the RAID secondary for a second identical hard drive for a RAID 0.  Therefore, I can't disable the RAID controller.  It seems kind of odd that my problem would be IDE device scans if the boot up time is very inconsistent.  I am beginning to think that my problem may be the drivers for my soundcard (Hercules Game Theater XP), since its the only non-standard part of my setup.  I'll try disabling the soundcard in the device manager and see what happens.