XP slow boot up

[crispy_chip]

XP pro SP2 (not totally legit), Athlon 2600+, Asus A7NXD MB, Nvidia G440 graphics, dual boot, 2HD multi partion.

Have disinfected using antivirus, defragged, uninstalled all unnecessy programs

Boot process and timing

3 sec bios

5 sec OS coice

6 sec blue scroll XP screen

5 MINUTES grey/black screen!!!

1 minute Welcome

1 minute more to curser ready

Total boot time 7 mins and 14 sec.

What is happening during the grey screen boot stage?

Can you monitor what happens during boot process?

Are there any registry cleaning/mods that will reduce this delay?

Is there a program boot disc or similar that will allow me to observe the progress through boot?

This has happened twice before on me and I reinstalled XP. I refuse to give in this time .. there must be an answer without going to this extreme.

By the way it takes less than 1 min to boot up safe mode.

Crispy

[Zxian]

Sounds like a driver problem to me. Make sure that you've got the updated drivers for all your components.

You can download BootVis from Microsoft to monitor the boot of your computer. It will give you a breakdown of what's going on as your computer starts up.

[firefoxthebomb]

Probably a driver like Zxian said, but you could also try a registry cleaner like Registry Mechanic to get rid of invalid enteries in you registry.

[chilifrei64]

find the utility called bootvis and run a trace to see what is taking so long..

Bootvis can be somewhat hard to find since it is a "No Longer Supported" piece of software from microsoft.. they have removed it from all their links on their site

[Zxian]

Hard to find, eh chilifrei64?

Google: BootVis

Hehe...

[chilifrei64]

well crap...I feel stupid... it is easy now.. I remember searching for a few hours once about 2 years ago right after MS discontinued support for it.. I havent bothered since.. looks like many people found it and have links to it now...

[crispy_chip]

Thannks Zxian and firefoxthebomb.

Unistalled all graphics, LAN, audio devices etc. Re booted .. still took an age .... reinstalled all devices off latest driver base without promted restart. Rebooted and hey presto!! Well impressed

I know the answer if it ever happens again. Guess there was some driver corruption?

chilifrei64

Thanks for advice on BootVis. Although I'm sorted I'll have a mess around in case of future issues.

Finally any advice on cleaning registry. Have '02 copy of fixit utilities. Ran reg cleaner before. Loads of green yellow and red issues. Kept re running after green deletion and ended up with few reds and quite a few yellows.

Anyone any idea what all these are.

Many refer to file locations that no longer exist.

Can I delete all these?

Should I leave the red ones?

Any help on this util appreciated.

Thanks

[Eck]

Have fear of older registry cleaners. Newer software and drivers often don't connect the dot's except for when they are being run.

Someone who keeps its registry cleaner software up to date and even accesses its server each time it is run to see if anything detected by its cleaner is in its database is Macecraft Software's jv16powertools2005.

It is no longer free, but worth it.

It doesn't break programs and its software manager is great to run after uninstalling software to remove left over stuff.

The registry cleaner in it does a conservative job, which is what one should want.

[Zxian]

Thannks Zxian and firefoxthebomb.

Unistalled all graphics, LAN, audio devices etc. Re booted .. still took an age .... reinstalled all devices off latest driver base without promted restart.  Rebooted and hey presto!! Well impressed

I know the answer if it ever happens again. Guess there was some driver corruption?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You're welcome.

My guess is that with corrupted/improper drivers, Windows is trying to figure out what to do with your hardware. Since it sort of knows what it is, Windows may get "confused" and stall on startup.

[Thauzar]

Thanks you so much. Had a slow booting problem and this thread is easily findable since it's 3rd in the list when searching for "slow boot".

Bootvis already has an optimise computer mode, so no need to look at traces (well for me i didn't have to, optimisation worked). Now everything is fine!

[ripken204]

http://www.driverheaven.net/dforce/dl.php?...le=TuneXP15.exe

i use tunexp, helped a whole lot in load times

[Angelico_Payne]

Similar thing happens when u disable lots of services, like event viewer, system notifiaction, COM+,...

long bootups, with sudden freezes, only in lesser degree, its like some service is waithing for disabled ones to start ???!!! anyone knows??

[suryad]

Thanks ripken for tunexp. So far I have only done reg tweaks, nLite, sys mech 5, ccleaner, pd 7 and bootvis as my weapons of choice to have a fast spiffy XP setup. There is only so much one can do to get speed. It is not like MS is handing out the source code and compilers to get each piece of software tweaked specifically for your machine. But for fater booter besides software tweaking look for really fast hard drives as well.

[agent__7]

Sorry to 'wake' this topic.. but I have the same problem !

The difference is that I got that problem by doing a forced shutdown.. I first hit start>shut down and then I pressed the power button for several seconds.

After a couple of minutes I started the computer and the BIOS started up, the HDD was ok (it showed up in the SATA utility).Then - black screen for about 1 minute (the system is responsive - I pressed Num Lock) after that - GRAY bar started loading for about 2 minutes, the chkdsk came up and than it restarted (after all that disk checking).

I reinstalled Windows XP SP2 and it boots even faster after the gray bar. I went into cmd and checked with fsutil if any drive was dirty. E was dirty so I fixed it. I tried to lose the gray bar with FIXMBR but noting...

Please help me because I am desperate ! I have to wait like 4 minutes every time I boot

P.S.: I have disabled some useless services like Remote Registry etc.

[LLXX]

That grey bar is the initial kernel memory image load. I really think you should check your hard drive for physical damage. That initial load should only take a few seconds.

Tried BootVis?

Edited November 7, 2006 by LLXX