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Slow windows startup

cmdrdredd

Lifer
I Ghosted a 120GB SATA drive to a 250GB x2 RAID0 and windows startup is very slow. Everything works 100% and the partition is the correct size and HDtach seems to show correct speed readings. I'm just wondering why windows starts so slow. Basically it sits at the screen that says "windows is starting up" and then "loading your personal settings" Not the black screen with the WinXP logo.

I don't hardly turn off my PC so it's not a big deal, but I'd like to fix it anyway if I can.
 
Look in the event viewer.

You probably aren't in a domain but if you are and somehow your DNS servers aren't pointing to the AD DNS server it can take long like that.
 
You don't say how slow it is. Are you sure it is unusual?
Have you cleaned up your startups and removed the unnecessary ones?
The Operating Systems Forum is a better forum for this subject. As a result, you may get more responses to your post.
 
Originally posted by: Navid
You don't say how slow it is. Are you sure it is unusual?
Have you cleaned up your startups and removed the unnecessary ones?
The Operating Systems Forum is a better forum for this subject. As a result, you may get more responses to your post.

Well, it's very noticably slow...more than a minute or so at the screen that pops up just after the black screen with the scroll bar and the WinXp logo.

Before I ghosted to the RAID it was fast (maybe 20sec at the very most), so yes it is very different from before.

There is no reason I see that would cause the difference in speed like that since it's an exact Ghost copy of what I had previously.
 
I didn't know that it was faster before transfer to RAID. This obviously is the right forum then.
I have no experience with RAID.
Good luck.
 
I've never tried to ghost a single IDE drive to a raid array, but that appears to be the source of your problem. Raid0 stripes the data across the drives, and in all honesty you will be better off with a clean install even though it's more time consuming. If someone else has a fix I would be interested in hearing it. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: John
I've never tried to ghost a single IDE drive to a raid array, but that appears to be the source of your problem. Raid0 stripes the data across the drives, and in all honesty you will be better off with a clean install even though it's more time consuming. If someone else has a fix I would be interested in hearing it. 🙂

Strange thing is, performance across all applications and benchmarks is also noticably faster than the single drive (obviously should be), but windows loads slower. I suppose I'll try BootVis and see what happens from there.
 
One thing to keep in mind is that the synthetic benchmarks you're using test the hardware. You appear to have a software issue.
 
Originally posted by: John
One thing to keep in mind is that the synthetic benchmarks you're using test the hardware. You appear to have a software issue.


Probably, but like I said everything IS faster than before as far as disk access goes. It's gotta be windows. I'm not sure if it can be fixed without going fresh install and I really can't afford that since I have alot of settings and apps installed at the moment.

I am open to suggestions on possible solutions.
 
A Raid controller will take several more seconds to initialize than an onboard IDE / SATA controller. It can take several minutes just for some of my Windows servers to hit the splash screen with RAID 5 controllers spinning up. It alls depends on the RAID card.

Once you see the XP splash screen though times should be the time.
 
Originally posted by: spike spiegal
A Raid controller will take several more seconds to initialize than an onboard IDE / SATA controller. It can take several minutes just for some of my Windows servers to hit the splash screen with RAID 5 controllers spinning up. It alls depends on the RAID card.

Once you see the XP splash screen though times should be the time.


Hrm...ok well, that's possible and I can understand this as a probably explination. I just really didn't expect it to be slower like that. However, since everything else is faster it's good I guess.
 
While a controller card may add 5-10 seconds to your initial boot time, I don;t see the controller causing you to hang at the welcome screen.
 
Originally posted by: John
While a controller card may add 5-10 seconds to your initial boot time, I don;t see the controller causing you to hang at the welcome screen.


It's on the motherboard though and coincidentially BootVis fixed it and now it loads faster than it initially did with a non-RAID.

Thanks for linking to BootVis and I was about to look for a startup optomizer through google anyway.
 
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