Odd xp booting issue

[Bluetooth]

Hi guys

 

Having an odd issue with a machine.

 

I have reimaged and reset the machine around twice now and the issue is still occuring.

 

The machine passes POST, continues to the xp load screen where the bar at the bottom then starts running VERY slowly and the machine takes much much longer to boot, around 15 - 20 mins, but once the machine boots and gets logged in the machine runs fine.

 

Anyone else seen this weirdness before? no matter what i do it seems to continue happening.

[LosOjos]

Have you ran msconfig to check there isn't anything odd going on in boot.ini? Could be that some options selected there are causing the unusually long boot time.

 

EDIT:

You could also check that the entry for XP in boot.ini has the "/noexecute=optin /fastdetect" switches on it, might help

Edited January 21, 2010 by LosOjos

[Guest TheLibrarian]

I've seen that happen when XP can't read a partition / drive attached to the machine.

[tech_guy]

It's not a Dell Optiplex is it?

[ajs]

I've seen a few machines over the years exhibit similar problems due to a corrupted prefetch file.

 

Deleting the files from the c:\windows\prefetch is safe because they'll just get recreated as needed. If the machine boots up quicker after deleting them, but then slows down once they're recreated, there is a MS document somewhere that details what registry keys you can change to affect how prefetch files are created.