Stange Boot delay problem. Becoming annoying.
Hello all. I'm hoping someone may be able to help with a boot delay problem I'm having.
During the boot sequence, I get to a stage when all my devices and IRQs are listed and then 'Verifying DMA Pool Data' appears. Now I have read a lot of post where peoples sytems will hang at this point, but my problem is a that I have a delay of about 60sec and then Windows boots normally.
If a boot from a floppy or CD then there is no boot delay.
Now, the strange part. If I set my first boot device to CD with a bootable disk in the drive, the BIOS detects this and says 'Press a key to boot from CD'. This times out after 10 secs and then boots from HD normally. However, in this case there is no boot delay, Windows XP splash screen appears immediately.
I have a Gigabyte SINXP1394 MoBo with F6 BIOS, Maxtor SATA 160 GB HD on a Silicon Images 3112A SATA controller. Clean install of Win XP Pro.
I have tried reverting to an older BIOS (F4), Fdisk /mbr, removing my second HD, changing boot sequence in BIOS and probably other things that I have forgotten. Still the same problem (except with a bootable CD in the drive).
Any help very much appreciated.
Cheers, Beastie. :banghead:
During the boot sequence, I get to a stage when all my devices and IRQs are listed and then 'Verifying DMA Pool Data' appears. Now I have read a lot of post where peoples sytems will hang at this point, but my problem is a that I have a delay of about 60sec and then Windows boots normally.
If a boot from a floppy or CD then there is no boot delay.
Now, the strange part. If I set my first boot device to CD with a bootable disk in the drive, the BIOS detects this and says 'Press a key to boot from CD'. This times out after 10 secs and then boots from HD normally. However, in this case there is no boot delay, Windows XP splash screen appears immediately.
I have a Gigabyte SINXP1394 MoBo with F6 BIOS, Maxtor SATA 160 GB HD on a Silicon Images 3112A SATA controller. Clean install of Win XP Pro.
I have tried reverting to an older BIOS (F4), Fdisk /mbr, removing my second HD, changing boot sequence in BIOS and probably other things that I have forgotten. Still the same problem (except with a bootable CD in the drive).
Any help very much appreciated.
Cheers, Beastie. :banghead:
0
Comments
A few quick things you can try:
1) Remove all non-essential IDE optical drives and see if the problem remains.
2) Double check your boot order in the BIOS, also make sure 'Boot from third party controller' is disabled (Presuming you're not using a PCI controller card).
3) Have a fiddle with the SATA hard drives jumper settings.
4) Disable any un-necessary controllers (There's a ATA-133 RAID controller on that board as well right?).
Try the above and then post back. Sorry for the delay in replying.
Cheers
I am gonna be a tiny bit embarrasssed if this is the issue, but last time I left a CD in my CD drive on a P4 box, I got just this-- turned out the CD got read most of the way through before I ejected the CD and Windows instantly came up and finished booting-- silly BIOS got curuious, told drive to read CD, drive wanted to read the WHOLE thing.... No, not kidding.... And on same box, this does NOT happen with a linux HD boot, with same CD in....
No hardware problems per se, either, just XP acting curious about the CD, it looks like, wanted to know how to mount it and somehow it thought it had to read the whole thing to figure that out. Yeah, replicated it three times or more, with various CDs.... Fix was to eject CD that got left in, and CD blank was not damaged but did have a lot of data on it in all cases. I think the CD drive was actually scanning CD and XP was making a directory beofre it started showing things on screen.... Changing CD drives and cables did not fix this.... Oh, one time I tried this with a CD with very little data on it, box booted faster-- LOTS faster.
Lessee, four CDs, two different drives, two motherboards, same problems (yes, I own two XP licenses since I have two boxes). XP really hates it when you give it a blank media CD that you forgot to take out when you decided to reboot, no directory to read at all....
The old fart who likes to PLAY with things-- that's me....
MEANT to add a little DE-Frustration atmosphere while discussing a frustrating thing that can happen so many ways it is not funny.... A little "KEY LIME TWIST"