Slowwwww boot

  • Thread starter Thread starter marcy
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marcy

I have a friend who has Dell Dimension 2400. It has 512MB ram and is
just for checking email. (XP Pro OS).

The problem is that it can take 10 minutes for XP to start up. It seems to
go through the POST ok, but then hangs with black screen and underscore
cursor at top left for up to 10 min. He says it has been doing this for
over
a year. So that seems to me it isn't harddrive or it would have died. Even
if it is an underperforming PS, I would thank that it would have died. He
did
say on occasion, it will start normally.

I know an additional memory stick was added long ago,.. maybe CMOS wasn't
reset??

Any thoughts. And is that PS ATX standard???

Thanks guys!!! You are the best!
 
marcy said:
I have a friend who has Dell Dimension 2400. It has 512MB ram and is
just for checking email. (XP Pro OS).

The problem is that it can take 10 minutes for XP to start up. It seems to
go through the POST ok, but then hangs with black screen and underscore
cursor at top left for up to 10 min. He says it has been doing this for over
a year. So that seems to me it isn't harddrive or it would have died. Even
if it is an underperforming PS, I would thank that it would have died. He did
say on occasion, it will start normally.

I know an additional memory stick was added long ago,.. maybe CMOS wasn't
reset??

Any thoughts. And is that PS ATX standard???

Thanks guys!!! You are the best!
Click to expand...


Boot sector problems maybe. Have you multiple partitions? Run XP's console and do a
"fixboot' or 'fixmbr' see if that helps.
Look into XP's event viewer.
 
Boot sector problems maybe. Have you multiple partitions? Run XP's console
and do a "fixboot' or 'fixmbr' see if that helps.
Look into XP's event viewer.
Click to expand...


No, just one partition, one OS. You don't think it is hardware??
 
marcy said:
No, just one partition, one OS. You don't think it is hardware??
Click to expand...

I had this same problem with my older server. XP would take forever to boot and then
sometimes, when I got to the desktop, explorer would fail or something else. Looked at the
event viewer and it claimed 'D' drive had bad a sector. I later discovered that XP makes a
mistake when identifying drive problems. It always assumes that your booting from the
active drive. Not so when the boot.ini is on 'C', in a dual boot scenario, anyway, fixed
the boot record and all is well. In fact very much better in many respects. Of course I
have bought a replacement drive and will integrate it into the system relieving that bad
drive of its duties.
 
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