Not too sure where ot put this one?

I have overclocked my old 550PIII - but as soon as I do Win2K
takes up to a minute to load! it goes throught all the startup
screens and at the last "little" one just before the "starting
network...." screen it just sits and "spins it's wheels" there is
a bit of disk IO going on.... not much, then after a minute or so
it just come on up like nothings wrong. The machine runs fine
once it's up, but it's very annoying!
It does this no matter how large(within reason) or how small the
overclock is.
Win2K loads up fine when the machine is not overclocked.... this is
weird!
Help anybody.... please.

oh yes, its on a Soyo sy-6ba+III board. (BX chipset)

If there is no problem after it boots up then what is the problem? Have you gained a noticable speed boost? Is it stable? If so I don't see boot time as being critical?

How often do you reboot? When I ran Win2k I only rebooted about once a week unless required by an install or something.

it's the age old thing about wanting to know why..... when
something is not working as expected.
Kind of like if your car has a hard time starting, you should want
to know why.

I'd say your hard drive doesn't like the overclocking, I don't think its Windows at all. I would say try a different hard drive, but obviously that isn't possible

Try reinstalling W2k on that same HD, with the overclocking settings present. I'm pretty sure it won't do it.

I have been tempted to re-install to a different drive... and like
you suggest, with the overclock in place.... but I was hoping for
an easier solution

Okay I reinstalled Win2k - still did it......so I installed win'98 - also
did it. So now I'm back with the origional install (viva Ghost) but
I have found out that it's the process of loading the system
register that is taking all this time.
For some reason the HDD is having a very hard time dealing
with this task???
I cannot figure out why, I'm going to swap out the drives and see
if it's just that one.
other than that I don't know what else it could be.... maybe the
it is the IDE controller .... but the Mobo is "designed"
for OC'ing I just find it strange that it would do this.
The cpu has run at well over 600 before with no problems...but right now
it does not seem to matter how slight the OC is i.e. 103 fsb, is
hardly an overclock, but it still does the same thing..... weird!

okay ...... it turned out to be the HDD.... I swapped it out and now
everything works just fine.
Thanks for the input.


okay this is the story.... the drive was an older type of drive,
Windows labels it as a "type46" to be exact.
These older drives have "slow" cache that, I have been told, does
not like being over clocked.... no harm done.