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XP pauses during login after copying boot drive

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imported_smirk

Junior Member
I have a fresh setup of Windows XP SP3 on a new computer I'm building. During the tail end of the build I noticed the new hard drive periodically making loud clicking sounds. Diagnostics showed no bad blocks but I figured better safe than sorry so I RMA'd the drive for a new and larger one (larger just because it was a good deal). I used Western Digital's Data Lifeguard boot CD to set up the new drive and copy over all the data. It took about 3-4 hours to copy over the 60 GB of data.

Anyway, the new drive boots up and all the applications work, but it seems slower at bootup and login than the old drive. Just before the login screen appears, the screen goes black for about 10 seconds before it turns blue and says "Windows is starting up...", after which the login screen appears. This doesn't occur on the old drive. On the old drive, it pretty much goes straight from the XP "progress bar" screen to the login screen. Also, once the login password is entered, I get the "Loading your personal settings" message for maybe 10 seconds, then the desktop appears with a partially filled in Windows taskbar (the outline of the taskbar exists, but some parts aren't drawn in yet). After another 5 seconds or so the taskbar becomes solid blue and we're good. On the old drive, this whole login process is virtually instant.

Any idea what could be causing this? The old drive is a new WD3200AAKS SATA drive, and the new one is a new WD6400AAKS SATA drive. This is a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU on a Gigabyte motherboard, with 4 GB RAM. I doubt the new drive is bad, but could Windows be looking for something in a different location before timing out and continuing? I really don't want to reinstall Windows plus all applications from scratch, but these login pauses make me very uneasy. Anyone else experience anything like this when copying a Windows installation to a new drive?

Thank you!
 
BootVis (originally developed by Microsoft) is a great tool for optimizing boot times (even though MS ssays it isn't)

BootVis

If you don't want to rum the optimizer, then at the very least you can look at what is going on during bootup.
 
It a possibility the drive is running slower because its running in pio mode check the device manager for the hard drive and see if its setting is correct.
 
You didn't leave the old drive connected, when you booted the new (cloned) drive, did you? That will really screw up the Windows installation on the new drive.

After cloning, you MUST disconnect the old drive, and then boot and then shutdown the new drive.

Then you can connect the old drive and re-format it, etc.

 
Funny you brought that up Larry, just today I bought a 300GB WD VelociRaptor which I tried to clone with Acronis True Image.. My setup consisted of a dual boot with two 500GB Samsungs, one hd running Windows 7 beta and the other Windows Vista 64. Basically I was trying to clone the HD with Vista 64 on to the new WD raptor so I can have an OS once the beta expires.. Needless to say, I had every drive connected during the cloning and once the cloning process was done the Raptor would not boot, I'm pretty sure the boot partion was on the cloned Raptor but I'm not sure.. Luckily I didn't screw up my Windows 7 partion because I wouldn't of had any OS if that were to happen, I'd have to start over from scratch and I probably would have cried for a few hours. Anyways, I'm guessing It all went wrong with me not disconnecting the other drives.. I ended up disconnecting the other drives while I installed Vista 64 on the new Raptor then I connected the other drives after the installation finished.. Where did I go Wrong?? Can anyone give me some tips so my cloning experiences would be better in the future.. Thanks in advance
 
Originally posted by: Elusiv1
Funny you brought that up Larry, just today I bought a 300GB WD VelociRaptor which I tried to clone with Acronis True Image.. My setup consisted of a dual boot with two 500GB Samsungs, one hd running Windows 7 beta and the other Windows Vista 64. Basically I was trying to clone the HD with Vista 64 on to the new WD raptor so I can have an OS once the beta expires.. Needless to say, I had every drive connected during the cloning and once the cloning process was done the Raptor would not boot, I'm pretty sure the boot partion was on the cloned Raptor but I'm not sure.. Luckily I didn't screw up my Windows 7 partion because I wouldn't of had any OS if that were to happen, I'd have to start over from scratch and I probably would have cried for a few hours. Anyways, I'm guessing It all went wrong with me not disconnecting the other drives.. I ended up disconnecting the other drives while I installed Vista 64 on the new Raptor then I connected the other drives after the installation finished.. Where did I go Wrong?? Can anyone give me some tips so my cloning experiences would be better in the future.. Thanks in advance
Click to expand...

I have had problems with True Image where it didnt make a bootable copy of my OS. I would get errors with the copy. I recommend you try ShadowProtect Desktop Edition 3.3 trial. It has worked much better True Image for me. Heres a link...................

http://forum.storagecraft.com/...y/files/9/default.aspx
 
TrueImage cloning works flawlessly all the time provided you boot with Acronis Rescue Media and avoid doing it in Windows.

1. Optimize your Source Drive.
2. Power Down
3. Boot to TI prepared CDR With Vist must be version 11 or later.
4. Select cloning utility.
5. Manual mode.
6. Select Source Drive
7. Select Target Drive
8. Select Delete any partitions on the target drive.
9. Select Keep all data on Source drive.
10. Select Proportional if different size drives.
11. Proceed.
12. When done, power down - disconnect Source drive and boot to the newly cloned drive.

I do this weekly on 3 systems for the past 4 years - never a problem.
 
Thank you corkyg, I will follow those steps next time I clone a drive.. Thanks for the techmanc, I really appreciate the help.
 
Hi everyone, thank you for all your suggestions. I did defrag the new drive (which wasn't fragmented because Data Lifeguard had just copied everything over and I think it does it at the file level). It also wasn't in PIO mode, although that's a good thing to look for. I also didn't leave the old drive connected when booting into the new one for the first time. I didn't get a chance to try BootVis, but that's a good thing to keep in mind for next time.

Well, after spending a couple hours trying to figure out what was wrong I ended up formatting the drive and reinstalling Windows and all the apps. That was a big bummer, but it eliminated those bizarre pauses. I guess I'll never know what caused it, unless the original drive was bad and some data got corrupted when copied to the new drive.

Anyway, thanks again for the advice!
 
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