Very slow boot up....

Hi, I have an IBM Thinkpad T23 with a Pentuim III, Mobile CPU 1133 MHz and 256 MB RAM. I'm running XP Version 2002 w/ SP2. When the machine has been off for several hours and I boot up, it takes over 9 minutes to boot. It seems to work normally after this long boot up. If I shut it down and then immediately boot up again, the time drops to around 4 minutes. Boot up in Safe Mode is also very slow. I have run disk cleanup and defrag and niether came up with much. The machine is almost empty with only 4 GB (out of 40) being used. I also tried running chkdsk and got the following:

Replaced bad clusters in file 1946 of name \WINDOWS\System32\autochk.exe
Replaced bad clusters in file 5327 of name \WINDOWS\System32\dllcache\fpmmc.dll
Replaced bad clusters in file 11133 of name \PROGRA~1\INFOGR~1\ROLLER~1\DATA\css41.dat
Replaced bad clusters in file 15252 of name \PROGRA~1\MICROS~2\Office\BUSINE~1\MSBP.M21

I did run the recovery console from the XP CD and repaired the installation but still no change in slow boot behavior. Also, this laptop has never been connected to the internet since I did the fresh install of XP back in December (from a formatted hard drive), so I don't think it's a virus problem. The only application I've added since the fresh install is MS Office which was done back in December also. I'm beginning to suspect a bad hard drive. Any suggestions on what might cause this?

 

A bad hard drive is exactly what it sounds like to me also... From the errors and the amount of disk space being used, I really don't see how it could be anything else...

 

Thanks A&O, that seems to be the consensus from the guys at work too.

 

try load system default settings