# [SOLVED] Very Slow Boot Problem



## pswfps (Oct 10, 2007)

Hi all. 

Just built a new PC and having problems with very slow boot time. This is my rig:

PSU: Jeantech Storm 700W
Motherboard: ASUS M2N32 SLI Deluxe (Wireless Edition)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dualcore 6000+
RAM: OCZ Platinum XTC 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400
GPU: Inno3D 8600GTS PCI-E
HD: Samsung 500GB SATA-II 300

Clean install of WinXP 32, SP2, motherboard and graphics drivers.

When switched on, BIOS does POST very quickly and without error. So far so good. Select WinXP OS (i have dual boot). The WinXP loader bar appears without any delay but it scrolls about 30 times which takes 70 seconds before it's done. Then the screen goes black for about 8 second, then the login screen appears. Onece I'm logged in the machine is fine. Just this rubbish boot time is driving me mad.

I've checked the windows device manager. Everything seems to be working OK - no yellow question mark icons.

I've flashed the BIOS to latest from the ASUS website. No better though.

Any ideas? Is there some sort of hardware incompatibility going on here? Can I fix it by tweaking BIOS settings? My RAM is described as "4-4-4-15" but I don't know what it means.

Any help much appreciated.

Cheers.

PS - My old rig was Asus A7N8X-E with Athlon XP 3200+, 1GB PC 3200. This booted up about 10 times faster than this new rig... can't be right.


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## pswfps (Oct 10, 2007)

*Re: Very Slow Boot Problem*

OK, found what those memory timings mean. Checked BIOS - it was defaulting to 800MHz 5-5-5-15 T2. Changed it to 800MHz 4-4-4-15 T1 which is what my RAM is meant to run at. System seems stable, memtest reported no errors. But still got that amazingly long boot time. I've no idea what is taking so long to do at boot up...:4-dontkno


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## pswfps (Oct 10, 2007)

*Re: Very Slow Boot Problem*

I think I've sussed it!!

When building the machine, I carried over an old IDE DVD drive into my new system. Now, since it is the only IDE device in there (all HDs are SATA) it was all on it's own on the cable... with the jumpers set to 'slave' mode. :laugh: Once I changed it to 'master', the machine boots up nice and fast just as it should.

Can you tell I'm an amateur? Anyway thanks if you scratched your head over this for me.


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## Deleted090308 (Jan 25, 2007)

*Re: Very Slow Boot Problem*

Thanks for letting us know the solution. :smile:


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