S L O W boot

I have a WD HDD 10.4GB. I just wiped it clean and formatted it NTFS, and cloned my other WD 10.5GB HDD to it, with Windows XP and Symantec Ghost 2003. The original HDD boots fine, but this new clone takes a very long time to boot. The PC is a Gateway P3 700 with 256MB RAM. Normally the Gateway screen comes up with a gray line taht goes from left to right and then a beep, then the OS loads. With this one the gray line gets one mark from the end then it hangs for about a minute, then the screen goes blank for about 5 to 10 minutes with a cursor flashing in the top left, then the OS loads.

Any ideas what can fix it without re-cloning or reformatting?

Thanks!
johnny5

 

It sounds to me like you need to check the bios setup routine to ensure that the drive is recognize and set up properly according to the ratings it has. It may be as simple as setting the bios to "Automatic" for drive detection after selecting the "Reset to Defaults" option.

 

try defrag then scandisk the drive sounds like the drive maybe going bad.

 

still working on it

I went into BIOS and it looked ok but I reset to defaults just to be sure. Still booting slow.....10 minutes or more at that blank screen. I am going to reformat the drive and re-ghost the XP installation. We will see if that does it. I eventually want a dual boot with Linux (not sure which distro to try) and XP.

 

I re-ghosted the drive and it still boots the same - super slow.

What should I be thinking of when re-cloning a drive? I am using Ghost 2003, and starting with the drive unallocated. I clone from a XP Pro system. I am using 2 WD 10GB drives. The thing that puzzles me is that the BIOS seems super slow too, but only when booting with that drive as master. The IDE is set to AUto, that drive is set as first boot, but there are two areas to set boot order, one for just IDE and the other for the system (?) and I have the usual 1. CDROM 2. Floppy and then 3. IDE.
Any suggestions?

 

I also just noticed that if I wait long enough it starts up GRUB again, even after I have reformatted and re-ghosted this hard drive twice. Is there a good way to remove EVERYTHING from this hard drive and start over? I think the MBR or boot sector is corrupted or something.

 

cool, I downloaded Killdisk and ran the free version, that at least took care of the GRUB problem by zeroing out the drive at low-level. I re-ghosted the drive again, but still it takes about 10 minutes to boot into XP, most of that between the time when it detects the keyboard and mouse, and the time the OS starts to load. I will look into the WD Disk Utilities and see if there is anything there that helps out.
Thanks!

 

On the WD webste I found the specs for the hard drive, a AC310100, and it appears that in single installation it should have the jumper removed. I took off the jumper and it booted fast and smooth!
Thanks for all who input!