"Starting up..." takes *2* minutes???

[thatguy]

hey all..

so i just switched up to win2k from win98. i'll say that it looks prettier, but on the "starting up..." screen (the one with mostly white and "windows 2000 professional" on it, and the progress bar on the bottom), the progress bar fills about halfway, then sits for literally 2 minutes, then continues on and everything loads normally. is that supposed to happen??? it seems like an awfully long time!

i'm running a celeron 700 with 256mb sdram, a diamond stealth ii g460, and a teac 32x cd-rom. the only odd thing in this machine is that the master hd is a 20g western digital (udma2, one partition), and the slave drive is a 1.6g western digital (mode4, one partition), but that's not so strange, right? i've already tried taking the slave out altogether and the delay is still there. i have no idea what to try next. the ms support site says something about large hard drives causing a delay, and the fix is to add a second multi() line into the boot.ini file, but the tech doc was incredibly vague and i'm not sure what to do.

can anyone offer some help? thanks in advance!

-- michael~

 

[neonyak]

I had also upgraded to win2k from win98. My master hd is 10gig, and my slave is 3gig. I'm running an Asus socket A Raid motherboard, 1ghz processor, 256mb ram. The size of the hard drives is a bunch of bull. It takes less than 30 seconds for my computer to boot up! Just to let you know that it really isn't normal, and I wish you the best of luck. I'll be honest and say I wish I knew how to help you, but I don't. Good luck!! s-) clgx299@earthlink.net
I came, I saw, I connected at 48.8...

 

[JohnVogel]

Are you running SP2?
Have you checked your devices for any kinds of conflicts?
Have you checked you HD's for fragmentation... if you have, are the system files (the one that can't be moved) located at the beginning of the drive?
When you installed your Win2K did you install it over win98? Info:
Job Title - Systems Administrator
Key responsibilities -
Database management design and administration - Network Administration - Internet and Intranet Administration and design - Technical support and consultation (PC Based)

 

[Guest_imported]

Hi,

My opinion is that, as u say u upgraded from win98, this cause MUCH trouble, when I say much, I mean really a lot. A lot of things are affected to Win2k from your old 'unstable' (everyone knows) win98.

The best thing you can do if after a scandisk and a defrag, is to backup your doc/soft and reformat the whole pc and make a fresh install : I guarantee you will see a diference.

Good luck, ask me anything u wish,

Regards,

Geniium

geniium@email.com

 

[thatguy]

unfortunately, i installed on a clean 20g ntfs partition (as opposed to installing over win98) so that's not the cause (sorry i wasn't clear in the first post).

i'm running on sp2 and there are no device conflicts or fragmentation. the problem even exists on the first boot up immediately after installation.

on the "Starting up..." screen, there's that blue wave bar (separating the white part of the screen from the gray), and i've noticed that it animates normally for about 20 seconds, then pauses for about 10 seconds and then repeats that two more times (total of 2 minutes wait-time)... like it's checking for some hardware that's not responding or something. then it continues on with the boot up. is there any way to log what it's checking for? i tried enabling boot logging, but that just logs the drivers that are/aren't loaded (there are several that "Did not load", could that point to something?)

thank you for the replies so far.. any more suggestions?

-- michael~

 

[wino777]

Just a thought...
Do you have a CD Burner Installed?
If so, is your ASPI layer up to date?

Win2k has problems loading the ASPI drivers if they are the incorrect version...
Be careful here, there are WinNT and Win98 ASPI drivers that seem to work but are NOT for Win2k.

Also --> Do you by chance have Easy CD Creator 4 or 5 installed?? Both of these programs are known to cause extended boot times (even if patched).

Basically, whatever the cause is, Win2k is trying to find/load a driver or service and is hanging while it retries.
Also occasionally a piece of hardware is failing to initialize. Have you installed any new hardware OR is all of your hardware Win2k compatible??
Perhaps you have an out of date video or sound driver?
Or IDE controllers??
Try disabling any services/drivers you don't need and see if you can narrow down where the delay is.

Sorry there isn't an easy answer, but you should be able to figure it out by first making sure that you DO NOT install Easy CD Creator, and theat your ASPI layer is up to date, and that your hardware/drivers are Win2k compatible...

Good Luck

 

[mark01]

Push F8 repeatedly until you get the menu that pop's up. Do a Step by step confirmation of all of the devices that it try's to load. Pay attention after you push the button, to see which device takes a long time to load. Then you can either disable, remove, or reinstall that device that is causing the problem.

If that doesn't work, then try to put your paging file(s) on a the opposite physical hard drive that the WINNT directory is on. This may not completely fix your problem, but it may speed it up a little.

Mark
A+ CNE

 

[thatguy]

HOORAY!!! so i finally figured out (by unplugging devices and rebooting) that my CD-ROM was causing the problem. it's rather old (12x teac cd-512e) and, apparently, not directly supported. when i check what driver win2k loads for it, i see: cdrom.sys, redbook.sys, and storprop.dll. but when i check the properties for cdrom.sys, the internal name says "scsicdrm.sys" which is confusing because this is an IDE CDROM.

so i'd like to use a different driver and see if it makes any difference, but the teac support site only offers teac_cdi.sys for DOS, and says "just let windows use its own driver." so here's the question (finally): is there any way that i can force win2k to use teac_cdi.sys instead of cdrom.sys (without an .inf file)? i've tried replacing cdrom.sys with a renamed teac_cdi.sys, but it immediately reverts back to the original cdrom.sys file (properties and all). does anyone have any suggestions? thanks in advance!

-- michael~