Slow Booting A7V

[procool]

I have had my share of problems on my new Christmas present...A7V-Tbird800. My board used to fire up and shut down in <2 seconds when you first plug in. The sales dude said it should do this as part of the POST. My board stopped doing this amongst some of my hardware/software/BIOS alterations trying to get it to boot in other than SAFE MODE in W98SE. I got the normal boot into 98 after re-arranging PCI cards enough times, but now it seems my boot takes over 3min. The stall occurs well after the ATA finds my 46g Maxtor. Any ideas?

 

[Dulanic]

Install Promise Drivers Build 25 or 33.... the rest have a long boot delay.

 

[nickburns]

ya , once you install the drivers on the cd that comes with the board, it takes about a minute longer to boot i noticed

 

[Regalk]

Welcome to the growing Club A7V. Do a search you will find tons of messages dealing with the issues affecting the A7V.

 

[rmblam]

You have a little tweaking to do to get it down. Many of us were 2min booters initially. I have a modded 1003 bios (Best for Duron users) with the latest promise bios update that helped trim the boot up. You might be better off with a 1004 or 1005 bios depending on your board revision? You should also go into bios and assign the cd-rom, dvd, or cd-rw rather than &quot;auto&quot; so it doesn't waste time detecting. Disable floppy detect in bios. Assign an IP to your NIC if present. Delete or rename drvwppt.vxd and drvw117.vxd if these files are present on your system. Get the latest promise drivers as mentioned. And the usual defrag and clean up that registry with regclean or Norton. Uncheck detect floppy in windows system file performance.

Sound Blaster cards are best in slot 3 because it is the only unshared slot. I have had big troubles trying to use slot 2 because it shares with the Promise controller. I get that lovely neverending reboot cycle.. I found a NIC or modem will work in slot 1 which shares with my Radeon but some people have had major conflicts with some vid cards... I suspect those are the Win2k people though.

I also found it better if Plug and play OS is set to NO in bios. I also force open IRQ's to occupied slots in the bios rather than let Windows assign then. You might want to disable your com ports, that most people do not use, so you can fee up two valuable IRQ's.

 

[rojay]

Long shot, but if you have a NIC card and you aren't hooked up to a network, sometimes windows will wait around for awhile trying to find a network and it can add up to a minute on booting. The computer that did this to me is up at college and I'm home on break, so I can't give you anything more specific than that on the problem I had. But here's something you can try - download this bootlog analyzing program and create a bootlog next time you boot your computer. Check for anything in there that takes a long period of time . . . then search the web to see if anyone else has had boot delays relating to that particular dll or whatever is taking so long. Good luck!

 

[procool]

Thanks rojay, neat little exe
I found a few bottlenecks....
50 sec on the enumerated floppy controller
25 sec on TCP/IP network (other pc's here are off and I'm the server)
24 sec on initing the ultra.mpd file...whatever that is, I'll check tomorrow when I'm awake again!

That should shave a good minute if I can trim those some, still more to go, maybe some IRQ assignments are in order too.

Thanks again!