Slow booting Windows on PC

Hi all,

The problem I have is that I have a pc, spec as follows:

A-Bit KG-7 Raid
Athlon 1800XP
512MB PC2100 DDR
64MB Geforce 4 MX 440
SB 128 PCI Sound
3Com 905 NIC
Hauppage TV Card
Philips 5200 CD-RW
LG DVD-Rom
3 x Maxtor IDE Drives - Models:

32049H2
6Y080L0
34098H4


Anyway, the problem I have is this. When the PC boots it takes about 10 minutes to start up. Once it loads, clicking on the start button means a 20-30 second delay before the menu appears. Once a programs been loaded once it speeds up on later loads (as you'd expect) but the whole thing is a real drain on the old patience.

This started on Win98 so I tried 2000 which made no difference. I then flashed the bios with all the updates from the A-Bit website and set all the bios settings to their defaults both failsafe and, later, optimum. I followed this up by upgrading the drivers on everything to the latest certified drivers and, when this made no difference, the latest drivers from the manufacturers sites.

After trying different video, sound and network cards as well as removing the TV card I installed mandrake Linux on a second drive and ran that which performed fine with boot ups well under 1 minute. I backed up all my data to a third drive and formatted both disks. A full scan using Powermax HDD diagnostics from the maxtor site showed no fault with the disks but to be on the safe side I installed Windows on the drive I'd used for Linux and swapped the IDE cables over as well. I bought and installed XP Home edition first and booted only to find it made no difference. I ran Knoppix on a live CD and that ran fine from the DVD-ROM. Putting Mandrake 10.1 on the 2nd drive left me with a perfectly working Linux but 10 minute loading WIndows.

Now, if it wasn't for the fact that Linux runs fine, I'd assume that the problem is in the motherboard but I don't want to pay out any more than strictly neccessary. My XP machines at work all have similar specs to my home PC but they run fine even including the extra time required for XP to load settings from the server.

Any comments, links to diagnostic tools or suggestions of what to try next are more than welcome as I'm running out of ideas.

Cheers folks,

Joolz

 

a shot in the dark...

You may have an antivirus (or spyware) scan running at 'boot'. Check the options in these programs to see if you can locate any 'boot' scans.

B

 

Lets backtrack a little. There was a problem with that board re: conflict between your regular IDE controller and the Highpoint controller until the highpoint drivers were installed. I believe you also have an AMD chipset and there were some very specific instructions re: setup of your MoBo drivers. I'm somewhat handicapped right now because I'm travelling and away from all my equipment, including previous notes re: this MoBo. I will say it is one of the more difficult boards to setup properly but runs quite nice once its done. I'll need to know a bit more re: how your HDD's are setup re: IDE #'s to assist you but don't expect to be back home for another week if you can wait that long. If you want to search this site for this particular board, I've posted about it with specifics previously.

 

Thanks folks,

I forgot to mention that the machine is a clean install with nothing on it other than the drivers (did this to minimise possibilities).

I have two HDDs on the primary IDE bus, the DVD & CD-RW on the secondary and a third disk on the highpoint controller. Interesting that the chipset is a known quirk so I'll chase that up before letting you know what happened.

Once again, thanks everyone. It's forums like this that make life that much easier

All the best,

Joolz

 

Strange thing....

Hi again all,

Weirdest thing, It dawned on me that I hadn't put the Highpoint driver for the raid controller on so I booted into XP to install and it worked at a decent speed. Put the HPT370 drivers on and stated using it. After three or four reboots it was still running fine but a couple of days later it went back to its slow state again.

I am totally baffled. If it ran slow all the time fine, but to go from one to the other?

I'm going to try a few things e.g. cables and stuff but then may go for a new mobo.

Still open to suggestions though,

Cheers all,

Joolz