XP Boot Problems - XP seems to be scanning the hard drives before boot... Challenge?

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Ok, so I guess you're all going to roll your eyes at this new member asking that same old problem... why is my machine taking ages to boot?

Well, before you ask, yes, I have googled for a soloution to my problems, and I have tried lots of different techniques to see if I can resolve the issue.

My problem is this, I'm running Windows XP SP2 with an Athlon 6400 Winchester Processor and 1gb of RAM. I currently have two hard drives, one storing game files, and the other which is partitoned, housing the windows install and the other housing other program files. The sizes of the drives are 160, and 40. The 160 has the partition - 8gbs for Windows, and the rest for program files.

I recently reinstalled windows, and my boot up times to start with were amazing, so I had no problems. Then, somewhen the problem occured, that is causing me boot lags. I've tried removing all drivers that I've installed, and using either basic windows XP drivers or updating the drivers from the internet. I've also tried good old BootVis, as well as CCleaner, Spybot Search and Destroy, Lavasoft Adaware, and F Prot Antivirus - no joy. I've also tried a system restore, and uninstalled all programs from the system.

I should mention that at this point that the boot time which takes about two minutes is taking ages lagging on the XP boot screen with the blue bar going across, once windows has finally loaded the processes such as antivirus and firewall all take literally about 2 seconds to load, so that part is fine.

A post on another forum indicated that the long delay at the bootscreen could be due to driver delays, so I added the /SOS switch to my boot.INI to see if one of the drivers was hanging.

The result was that the drivers loaded in about 2 seconds, and then the system hung on a blue screen stating the version of windows and the processor in use. After this long wait, a black screen apears for a bit, before white text appears telling me that the three drives (well two - one is partitoned don't forget) are error free.... I'll reboot now and check out exactly what the message is). It occurs to me that this looks like the computer is checking the drives on every boot for errors, but I simply can't work out where the problem lies.

If anyone could shed light on to exactly what is happening, I'd be really appreciative!

Thanks in advance,

Rastaman25 (17, UK)


Edit: The blue screen shows : (The one that seems to hang the most)
Microsoft (R) Windows (R) Version 5.1 (Build 2600: Service Pack 2)
1 System Processor [1024 MB Memory]

The black screen that is shown after shows:

Checking File System on D:
The Volume is Clean.
Checking File System on F:
The Volume is Clean.
Checking File System on C:
The Volume is Clean.
Windows has finished checking the disk.
 
Okay, you need to understand that there is a perfectly normal 'blue screen' that shows briefly right before the log on screen. This is NOT the blue screen that is referred to as the 'Blue Screen of Death' BSOD, which is displayed when there is an error and has white typing on it.

I'm bit confused about your references to 'drivers'. So I will simply ask: Have you stopped everything from starting when you boot EXCEPT the anti-virus program and firewall? If laptop, the touch[pad process also need to start up....."Nothing" else needs to start at boot and running the background.

If multiple programs are starting up, your startup will be slower and since you'll be dragging them around with you, your performance times will be slower.

So let's stop the 'driver' talk for now:

Start> Run> type in 'msconfig' (no quotes)> OK> Selective Start-up> Startup tab>. click to UNCHECL all but the above mentioned processes> Apply> OK.

Reboot> Close nag message that come up after checking 'don't show this message again.'

NOTE: if you can't see enough to ID the program name, put your cursor over the dividing line at the top of the column and move it to the right.

If you still need help identifying the processes use databases below:

STARTUP APPLICATION DATABASE LIST
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm
http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php

After you have cleaned u the startup programs, let me know how the startup goes.
 
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