4 Minute Boot Times?!

Hi all, yesterday I built myself a "new" system consisting of:

Athlon XP 1600+
Epox 8KHA+
256MB Crucial PC2100
Powercolor Geforce 2 Pro 64MB DDR
15GB 7200RPM Maxtor
60GB 5400RPM WD
Maxi Sound Fortissimo PCI
3com PCI NIC
Generic IEEE 1394 PCI card
50x Generic CD-ROM
16x10x40x Digital Research CD Burner
All in a spiffy new 300w Antec case.

I set the system up to dual boot Win98 and WinXP Pro. I use XP as my primary OS, with 98 being the "in case $hit" OS. Anyway, my problem is this. It takes me 4 full minutes to boot into WinXP! It takes slightly longer than normal to boot into 98 too, but the difference is not nearly this severe. During the boot-up process in WinXP, my system just sits there doing nothing for a minute or two while the WinXP "progress" bar moves back and forth, stopping a few times. Then there's some hard drive activity, and the screen goes black (like in normally does), but instead of only lasting a second, it spends another full 2 minutes just sitting there, until finally the WinXP logon screen appears. All my drivers are up to date, and as far as I know all my drives are properly configured in the BIOS. What cause be the cause of these long boot times and how can I fix them?

I'm stuck for time right now but one thing a friend of mine (who is pc illiterate) had as a boot up problem was a nic set to use dhcp with no dhcp server available. Boot would stall for about 1 1/2 minutes looking for a dhcp server that wasn't there!

Set him to a static ip and all was good.

That sounds interesting, but my cable ISP RoadRunner uses a DHCP server. At what point in the boot-up process does winxp try to optain an ip address?

well one thing that helps is get teh newest drivers and also unplug your nic and see if times improve. with fresh install I would say 20-25 from power up is normal in xp. once you have a ton of **** then takes maybe 35seconds with your setup.

dhcp

Yup... work in a helpdesk at an isp, and noticed that with adsl and cable you can end up with really long boot times! It usually comes with either internal adsl modems, or anything with usb.

i tried taking out the NIC, but my boot times don't improve. However, they are no longer in the 3-4 minute range. Now they are about 57 seconds. When I ran WinXP on my old system (a celeron 600@945), boot times where around 35 seconds. I guess I'll have to live with a whole 25 seconds more boot time

Nero,

I used to have the same problem with DSL and the built in XP firewall. Check the event viewer; I bet the firewall has hung several times...

Here's what I did (this quote helped me):

"Go into your network connections - you will most likely have 2 connections
shown - your broadband connection (which you use to dial), and your netword
card (shown as a LAN or HIGHSPEED CONNECTION). Right-click Local Area
Connection, go to Properties, and UNCHECK (thats right) all four boxes
shown: Client for MS, File Printer Sharing, QoS, and TCP/IP. Apply changes.

Note - DO NOT change any settings in your "broadband" connection properties.


Reboot - I bet your problems go away (if I guessed your network situation
correctly).

The reason for that delay at desktop is windows trying to
auto-connect through your network card to gather tcp/ip info; it mistakenly
thinks your dial-up/broadband connection is LAN based."

Good luck

Angryviking, thanks for teh suggestion, but instead of helping, it shot my boot-up times up to a minute 54! I'm beginning to think that my firewire card will be the first thing I troubleshoot. It establishes itself as a network connection, and I've had other problems with it before.

I installed the latest VIA 4in1s and Bus mastering drivers, and my boot time is now up to 3 minutes 30 seconds! Once the system boots, it's a dream machine, fully twice as fast as my old pc, but this whole boot thing is pi$$in me off!

On another note, my friend somehow (without overclocking) managed to fry his brand new XP 1900+ (think pink ooze! from the die!).

Nero,

Check to see that all your hardware is on the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) at Microsoft.com

Even if 1 device isn't on that list- XP will act badly. Since we are not in the Win9x realm anymore, legacy devices or ones that don't meet XP specifications are not supported.

Nero said:

i tried taking out the NIC, but my boot times don't improve. However, they are no longer in the 3-4 minute range. Now they are about 57 seconds. When I ran WinXP on my old system (a celeron 600@945), boot times where around 35 seconds. I guess I'll have to live with a whole 25 seconds more boot time

Click to expand...

did you update all your drivers for everything? what about the via 4 in 1 you running those?