Takes ~5 minutes to boot into windows after clean install

[Corporate Thug]

Rig in sig.

I did a clean install and the "starting windows" splash screen appear for about 4-5 minutes before the system boot into windows. Once the OS loads, everything runs just fine and responsive. Why the long boot time?

 

[hennessy1]

Could be a hardware or driver problem or both. I had an add on card that failed and would cause a delayed boot.

 

[Corporate Thug]

Could be a hardware or driver problem or both. I had an add on card that failed and would cause a delayed boot.

what hardware could it possibly be? I'm using the exact same components...I just swapped cases and reformatted.

 

[hennessy1]

What hard drive do you have? Also have you ram diagnostics on your memory and hard drive?

 

[Corporate Thug]

What hard drive do you have? Also have you ram diagnostics on your memory and hard drive?

WD Black 640 GB. I'll run memtest on the memory.

Any suggestions on HDD diag tool?

 

[hennessy1]

Western Digital has their own diagnostic tool you can run from a usb drive or from a cd.

 

[dbcooper1]

When it does come up finally, go into device manager and see if all devices loaded or if there are any ! or ? listed.

 

[Corporate Thug]

When it does come up finally, go into device manager and see if all devices loaded or if there are any ! or ? listed.

I'm on the road tonight but I will check tomorrow.

I will also try to disagree services in MSCONFIG to see if that helps. I can also try to create a boot log.

 

[corkyg]

It should get better with subsequent reboots. First time is when everything has to be registered, etc.

 

[Corporate Thug]

Ok, so I ran memtest for 6+ hours with no errors and no errors for SMART either.

So I launched the system panel and I noticed only ONE of the optical drives is showing (although bios shows both). I also uninstalled Malwarebytes, which is the only other program installed other than firefox, acrobat, and jzip.


I rebotted and REMOVED the the molex connectors from the optical drive...booted in windows in under 30 seconds. So I believe I narrowed it down to either Malwarebytes or the optical drives.

 

[cheez]

Just wondering which one was the cause. Have you tried putting the optical drive back on and see if the system still boots up fast?

 

[Corporate Thug]

Just wondering which one was the cause. Have you tried putting the optical drive back on and see if the system still boots up fast?

Gonna do that tonight.

 

[gevorg]

Could also be a network issue, some windows services do a certain network lookup that can slow down the boot.

 

[Corporate Thug]

I'm almost 100% sure its the optical drive. I removed one and it book fine (even with Malwarebytes installed). I was just thinking about this and I remembered that I disconnected the drive 6 months ago because I was getting a ton of coaster (actually every burn was a coaster) so I concluded it was a defective drive and unplugged it. I guess I forgot about that when I was moving the components into a new case.

 

[Vic Vega]

I've seen similar things happen with optical drives under Windows XP. The driver tries to poll the device during boot and won't move on until it's satisfied with whatever it's requesting from the device.

 

[corkyg]

Back in the "old days" the optical drive delay was common. To work around, we just kept a read only CD in the drive. The optical drive is often the first drive polled in the boot cycle (boot order in BIOS.) You can move or remove the optical in that boot order list.

 

[Corporate Thug]

Back in the "old days" the optical drive delay was common. To work around, we just kept a read only CD in the drive. The optical drive is often the first drive polled in the boot cycle (boot order in BIOS.) You can move or remove the optical in that boot order list.

Thats just the thing, my BIOS is always set to boot for HDD and NO other boot devices...I thought that would have resolved the issue because it wouldn't poll the optical if its not a boot device...

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I know this is a small drive, but does it need alignment?

 

[McWatt]

Thats just the thing, my BIOS is always set to boot for HDD and NO other boot devices...I thought that would have resolved the issue because it wouldn't poll the optical if its not a boot device...

If it's showing the Windows splash screen it's already passed the BIOS boot drive polling, so that's not the issue. You might try a new cable for the optical drive, too. You're probably dealing with a hardware problem.

 

[piasabird]

I remember that with XP with an optical device like a DVD or a writable CDROM drive it writes something to the drive in the INI file. This can get messed up and it is hard to change if the drive letters change or you add a drive. One drive can be bad also. The older the Optical drives the more problematic it can be. Some drivers worked under the original XP, but after updates they quit working. Did you apply all of the updates to XP?