A common cause of slow booting is an installed networking device such as a NIC card that is not connected to a DHCP source. If you have a NIC that is not plugged into a network or a modem, you might want to assign it an IP address to facilitate prompt booting. If you’re on a LAN and have mapped drives, or log into an NT domain, the next suspect would be a miss-typed password or username.
Heh – on my own LAN I just ran into that last one. My dev machine was taking over 3 minutes to boot, but that was normally a 15 – 20 second process. Nothing I tried worked, and I was beating myself over the head trying to solve it. All of a sudden, as I was re-entering my password server-side for the zillionth time, it occurred to me I was using an 84 key keyboard on the server to save space, and it had the numpad integrated into the left side of the alpha keys. No indicator lights. The server booted with numlocks on per BIOS default, and since the password was hidden, I never noticed I was typing in numbers for part of my password. Once I turned numlocks off and retyped the password on the server my dev system instantly logged in with no further ado.
In practice, I’ve seen the delayed boot from a NIC many times. If this is not the issue, more information will be needed in order to troubleshoot it properly. When did this start? Was it right after a new install of hardware/software? Do you get any errors, such as stop errors, on a regular basis? Are there any other symptoms?
Hope this helps.
DosMaster
"To err is human, to really foul things up, it takes a computer."
"Even a fish wouldn't get in trouble if it kept it's mouth shut!"
" *REAL* Programmers can write: 'Copy Con Program.Exe' "
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