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XP takes 20 minutes to boot

DT4K

DT4K

Diamond Member
My friend installed XP pro on a new formatted drive. Now, when it gets to the screen with the XP logo and the progress bar, it just sits there for 15 or 20 minutes, then finishes booting. Once it has done all of this, it works fine. Anybody have ideas, other than just never turn it off.

Thanks
 
Need a little more input.

What type of system? (motherboard, cpu, drives)

Did anyone check in the Device Manager to see that there are no Devices errored out?

Did anyone check the Event Viewer to see if there are any error codes?

 
Originally posted by: Shanti
My friend installed XP pro on a new formatted drive. Now, when it gets to the screen with the XP logo and the progress bar, it just sits there for 15 or 20 minutes, then finishes booting. Once it has done all of this, it works fine. Anybody have ideas, other than just never turn it off.

Thanks
Click to expand...

I had a problem similar to yours...just did a complete format and reinstall of the operating system and it went away.
 
Well, the problem is my friend lives 3 hours away, and when he called me, he wasn't even at home with the computer. So I'm trying to do like third hand tech support for him. The night before last, I told him to use fdisk, wipe out the partitions, and recreate them, then format and do a reinstall. Last night I talked to him and he said his friend who was helping him with it tried that, but who knows. They don't really know that much about computers. I'll give him some of the suggestions you guys have mentioned and if that doesn't work, I'll get some more details about the specifics
 
Thanks for all the tips.
I went to my friends this weekend to help him with it.
Checked the event logs and device manager. No problems listed there.
Reformatted and reinstalled XP, still had the same problem.
Reformatted and installed Win2K, still had the same problem.
Reformatted and installed XP again, still had the same problem.
Flashed the BIOS and cleared CMOS, the problem went away, but the USB mouse no longer worked.
I checked the BIOS and saw that USB was disabled.
After enabling it, the problem returned and once again it took 20 minutes to boot.
I now realized there was a USB problem. I tried plugging the mouse into the front USB ports while the system was on, and I got an endless series of messages about a USB device malfunctioning.

I pulled the front USB wire off the mobo headers. Problem fixed.

Apparently, it was hooked up wrong. Still seems weird to me, but in both XP and 2K, it looks like the OS was spending 20 minutes trying to correctly detect the front USB ports, then giving up and disabling them.

Anyway, after about 12 hours of troubleshooting we finally got it fixed.
 
You don't know how many times I kicked myself afterwards for not following the two main basic rules of troubleshooting.

1. Remove all cables, cards, memory, etc that you don't need to reduce the number of possible causes of a problem.

2. It's usually the simple things.
 
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