Having to boot twice.

[medford420]

I have an AMD950MHZ w/ ABIT KT7 mobo running windows 2000 professional. Everytime I boot up, the first time freezes before the all-powerful 'beep'. I turn off/on the power...it then boots just fine. Although this is manageable, I would like to fix it. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

 

[edfair]

Can sometimes be drive access from the BIOS before the drive is up.
How about powering up , then reset a second or 2 later? Does that change the behaviour? Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[medford420]

By reset I assume you mean push the RESET button on the front of the machine. I will try it when I get home. Thanks. What is that meant to achieve?

 

[edfair]

If the drive isn't ready by the time the BIOS wants it, the reset restarts POST and gives the drive the extra time. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[jtb]

I have the same trouble on a home-built box (Celeron 1.3GHz, ???? Motherboard, 384MB RAM, 40GB HD, 40x CDROM)...

At first I thought maybe something wasn't plugged in right... memory, CPU, drives... replugged all...

It might be the drive is only 5400rpm...

Or it might be the whole system is marginally incompatible with each other...

I have had the same trouble with W98, NT4 Wkstn, W2K Pro...

I just live with it; but any advice gives me another excuse to open it up and play with the innards...
JTB
Solutions Architect
MCSE-NT4, MCP+I, MCP-W2K, CCNA, CCDA,
CTE, MCIWD, i-Net+, Network+
(MCSA, MCSE-W2K, MCIWA, SCSA, SCNA in progress)

 

[edfair]

I lived with one for about 3 years, would fail about 1 in 10 boots. Wasn't a big deal, powered up, moved to the reset, pressed, and waited. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Win98User]

I have had this problem in the distant past, it was caused by a hardware conflict, I ended up having to replace my network card with another make. So perhaps if you have add-ons you could take them out one at a time and see if the boot problem disappears.

Please let us know if this is was helpful.

Regards.

 

[medford420]

I tried pushing reset during the bootup process. Didn't seem to work. Is there a specific time that it needs to be pushed, say after the first drive gets initialized? I only have a video card and a soundcard (SoundBlaster Live! Platinum) installed currently. Could it have to with the drive boot order?

Thanks for you help.

 

[edfair]

If it was related to drive access time any reset before use would slow things down enough to resolve the problem.
You could try boot order, but I suspect that you already are a , c . But you could try seek on POST, that builds in a delay.
But I don't think you have a delay problem based on the result. I'll think on it a while and others will add things to try.
Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Win98User]

If you have a scanner or printer attached make sure they are turned off before you turn the machine on.

I have seen a scanner attached to a machine cause the self same problem.

Personally, I would strip the machine to the bare essentials and see if the problem was still there - I would even take the sound card out and unplug all accessories except keyboard, monitor and mouse.

Best of luck.