XP Machine takes an hour to boot but then runs fine

amallon

I have an Xp Sp3 machine which is acting a bit weird.

When I turn on the machine I get passed the XP logo but the welcome screen doesn't come up. I just have a black screen. This stays for around an hour then then welcome screen comes up and the computer is fine. I've checked the event log and there are no errors.

I tried booting from an XP ERD cd and the computer gets so far and pauses as well. I havent left the ERD running for long enough to find out if it does eventually carry on.

I have ran chkdsk and the hard drive reports no errors, I've ran combofix and it says everything is fine.

Any ideas?

testicle

sfc /scannow

amallon

Good suggestion. Will try that once I get it to boot again.

hearny

Look at the event viewer in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools and check the times of the entries aswell as the errors, see if there is any big gaps between the times.

Download and run Autoruns from technet to see what starts when windows boots.

Also does it take long to start in safe mode.

amallon

I booted the machine at 11 last night. I could see some of the normal start events in event viewer then there was a gap until 12:10. I looked at Autoruns and the only thing out of place way applecharger.sys I haven't installed any apple software on this machine. I disabled this but the machine still takes ages to boot.

I ran sfc /scannow but no joy there either.

I'm going to try a repair install of xp to see if that works.

hearny

Was there many errors in the event log on startup,

What were the entries either side of the time gap.

Did you try safe mode?

I would also run a disk check on the hard drive, once the computer boots go to my computer, right click on the C: drive, click properties, click the tools tab and under error-checking click check now, tick the 2 boxes and press start.
You will get a message saying that the drive cant be checked would you like to schedule a disk check on start up, select yes and reboot the machine.

harney

Run msconfig and stop all the start-up programs. See how long it takes to boot, and if it boots fine then re-enable one by one till you find the problem.

amallon

There are no errors at startup in eventlog. Safe mode takes the same hour or so to boot. I have ran chkdsk already on the drive and it reports no errors.

I will try msconfig to see but I reckon if safe mode is taking an hour to boot msconfig will be the same. I have probably another half an hour to wait before I can use the PC.

harney

It might be worth booting off a Linux live disk to see how that behaves. You can either boot from a cd/DVD or usb.

yoyo

Might be worth checking the RAM, can cause stange behavior like this. Download memtest86+ and run it for a couple of hours, see how it does

Nick

amallon

I swapped the RAM out but no joy. The machine is still under warranty so I've sent it back the manufacturer and will let them sort it. Thanks for the suggestions.

Rabidlamb

amallon wrote: »

I swapped the RAM out but no joy. The machine is still under warranty so I've sent it back the manufacturer and will let them sort it. Thanks for the suggestions.

I've seen this happen when a USB or SD card is plugged in.
The boot sequence keeps checking these removable drives first & gets stuck in a loop looking for the OS.
Unplug everything & see if you can identify the offending piece of hardware.

Freddy Smelly

Rabidlamb wrote: »

I've seen this happen when a USB or SD card is plugged in.
The boot sequence keeps checking these removable drives first & gets stuck in a loop looking for the OS.
Unplug everything & see if you can identify the offending piece of hardware.

^^^ this.

a bad memory stick or external hard drive or missing network drive can cause this delay.

if u have your pc on a network disconnect any network drives one by one that might be mapped to it (this includes any drives in an NAS box as they maybe faulty)

Gormal

surprised no one has mentioned checking the Bios boot order making sure it is set to boot from hard drive