MCE05 - Extreme slow boot

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Fark_Maniac

2[H]4U
Joined
Feb 21, 2002
Messages
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The parts:
AMD 2500+ @ 2GHz
1GB PC3000 @ 150MHz
DFI NFII Ultra Infinity
ATI Radeon 9700pro
Hauppage PVR150

So that's the basics right there. My XP MCE05 is fully updated on windows update. I've run the latest PVR150 drivers as well as its beta drivers. I run the latest catalyst drivers. I run the latest nforce drivers.

I believe my system is well above minimum specs for MCE.

My problem is that it takes a good 5 minutes to boot...possibly up to 10 min. When I want to launch the MCE software, it takes another good 5 - 10 min.

Anyone have any ideas? see any conflicts? I'm at a loss.
 
I have a feeling you need to run disk doctor and repair any errors on the disk, also defrag the disk. If this does not help it sounds like your hard disk may be failing.
 
Maybe DMA is disabled on the drive? Something to check in either the BIOS, or in the System Properties.

If you have the nVidia IDE drivers installed, you might try removing them and using the regular windows IDE drivers. Some machines have issues with the nVidia IDE drivers.
 
Each channel is set to use UDMA and each drive is at UDMA 5, 5, and 2

I just ran Seagate's online HD checking software and looks like my 200GB drive has bad sectors...burning the bootable version now.

good calls guys.
 
Well, I ran Seagate's disk utility and supposedly fixed 4 bad sectors...but XP's boot time is still insanely long.

I'm going to run Prime95 on it soon to see if the proc is doing something funny.
 
Turns out it was the hard drive with bad sectors.

My workaround involved putting the drive on a PCI IDE controller card instead of the builtin IDE controller.
 
FWIW, I was having slow boot times on my MCE machine as well, and something somebody said above reminded me that nvidia's IDE drivers can suck sometimes. So I uninstalled them and it cut down the loading times from about 1 minute to the normal 10 seconds or so. I'm glad.
 
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