XP boots slow when only 1 drive hooked up

[jiggamanjb]

Basically I was playing around and noticed that when I hook up two drives to my SATA ports ( I only have two ports ) my WinXP splash screen only displays for two cycles of the blue bar. When I only have 1 drive hooked up the blue bars go for about 6-8 cycles. What gives? ( rig is in sig )

[CreePinG_DeatH]

Is the second driveset as like a 4th boot device in BIOS? Maybe it's still searching for the drive...

[terran2k]

and it does 6-8 cycles everytime you reboot with one hdd, or the one time after you un-install the 2nd hard drive. I'd guess xp uninstalling the hardware that not there on the 1st power cycle

[jiggamanjb]

Actually it's fast the 1st few times after I unistall the 2nd HD, maybe 2 cycles. After about 5 restarts it goes back to it's usual 6-8 cycles.

I'm 99% sure my BIOS is set CDROM->SATA->floppy. I'll have to double check, but I'm at work....

The only thing I could think of was that Win is looking for another drive on start-up and that is what is taking so long when nothing is there. I could be completely wrong though.

[KillrBuckeye]

I've noticed strange changes in the duration of the Windows splash screen before, and I still have no idea what causes it. Sometimes I notice the change after installing/uninstalling drivers, while other times I might only remove and reinstall a piece of hardware. Sometimes I notice a long delay if my network cable is unplugged.

One thing I've noticed is that in general, the overall duration of the Windows booting process, from the time it starts to load until everything is finished loading (HDD activity stops) seems to be about the same regardless of how many cycles of the scroll bar there are in the splash screen. In other words, sometimes I've noticed many cycles of the bar (6 or more), but once it gets past that point it's just about finished loading. Other times the bar will only cycle 2 times or less, but then there is still about 20-30 seconds of loading (a lot of HDD activity) after the Windows logon/desktop appears.

[CreePinG_DeatH]

Actually it's fast the 1st few times after I unistall the 2nd HD, maybe 2 cycles. After about 5 restarts it goes back to it's usual 6-8 cycles.

I'm 99% sure my BIOS is set CDROM->SATA->floppy. I'll have to double check, but I'm at work....

The only thing I could think of was that Win is looking for another drive on start-up and that is what is taking so long when nothing is there. I could be completely wrong though.

I am not trying to be nit-picky here, but for my raptors (not in raid) I have the boot process as cd-rom->hdd-0 with searching for bootable floppy enabled. I note the difference because there is an option to boot a SATA device instead of hdd-0. Do you have your bios looking for SATA or hdd?

(might just be my motherboard though)

[jiggamanjb]

I am not trying to be nit-picky here, but for my raptors (not in raid) I have the boot process as cd-rom->hdd-0 with searching for bootable floppy enabled. I note the difference because there is an option to boot a SATA device instead of hdd-0. Do you have your bios looking for SATA or hdd?

(might just be my motherboard though)

hmmm, I'll give that a try :)

I've noticed strange changes in the duration of the Windows splash screen before, and I still have no idea what causes it. Sometimes I notice the change after installing/uninstalling drivers, while other times I might only remove and reinstall a piece of hardware. Sometimes I notice a long delay if my network cable is unplugged.

One thing I've noticed is that in general, the overall duration of the Windows booting process, from the time it starts to load until everything is finished loading (HDD activity stops) seems to be about the same regardless of how many cycles of the scroll bar there are in the splash screen. In other words, sometimes I've noticed many cycles of the bar (6 or more), but once it gets past that point it's just about finished loading. Other times the bar will only cycle 2 times or less, but then there is still about 20-30 seconds of loading (a lot of HDD activity) after the Windows logon/desktop appears.

I too have noticed that sometimes the splash screen time varies, but boot time overall stays the same. This is noticablly faster boot though. It's like Win is waiting for info from that 2nd SATA port and eventually it just times out.

[KillrBuckeye]

This is noticablly faster boot though. It's like Win is waiting for info from that 2nd SATA port and eventually it just times out.That sounds like a logical explanation to me. I know with my setup, I keep a lot of my utilities that are simple executables on my data storage HDD and just provide shortcuts to them in the Startup folder. If the OS drive can't find the executables referenced by the shortcuts, then it may delay the boot process.