win2k: Trouble at stratup.

[loudmouth]

Just installed Win2k on a clean HDD. Whats happening is that after all application load for some reason the HDD keeps going. I have no clue on what its doing but it doesn't allow me to anything else for like a minute or two. And this is after it has loaded all application during startup. Anyone know whats going on?

 

[Junior77]

You need to give more detail as to what apps are loading. You shouldn't have many loading at startup anyway.

 

[loudmouth]

This is on my Dell Inspiron 8k. I have only Norton AntiVirus 2001 loading at startup.

 

[loudmouth]

Ok, i defraged the drive. not that I had too, but did it anyway. Did not help.

why does the HDD keep going after everything has started up. I am willing to try anything.

 

[nortexoid]

turn DMA off and see if it keeps doing it...

was gonna say install a specific set of via bus master drviers, but notice u have a dell, thus intel chipset...

so again, turn DMA off and see if that works...

 

[loudmouth]

OK, I got problem. I cannot find DMA settings under Device Manager -> HDD properties. The only thing under the Disk Properties tab is "Write cache enabled". I'm I looking in the wrong place?

 

[jaywallen]

loudmouth,

For what it's worth, that sounds like normal behavior (if this is an NTFS partition) on a notebook computer. There's a fair amount of data gathering going on for the first couple of minutes after startup, and a notebook's drive is SLOW compared to a desktop's drive. If this is a drive which was converted from FAT32 to NTFS, then you have 512 byte clusters, and that greatly exacerbates the problem.

All of the notebooks I've seen running W2K on large NTFS partitions do this.

If you want to experiment with DMA, the settings are under the primary and secondary ide channels in Device Manager. I suspect that turning DMA off would make things worse rather than better.

My guess is that you'll have to learn to live with it. I've set up dozens of desktops and notebooks in this OS. The recent desktops take about 45 seconds to a minute or slightly more to boot. The notebooks take as much as 4 or 5 minutes before all drive activity ceases, though you can usually start doing some types of work (like getting connected to the Internet) during the final couple of minutes of disk activity.

Hope you get it sorted out to suit you.

Regards,
Jim