Windows 7 boot time more than 20 minutes for fresh inst

Any ideas on what could be causing the problem will be highly appreciated as I am totally lost now having tried all the below mentioned tasks.

The machine configuration is as follows.

Motherboard - ASUS P5K PREMIUM/WIFI-AP LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel
Memory - 8 GB (Two kits of Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model PDC24G6400LLK)
HDD - 1x250 GB SATA (OS installed on this), 1x500 GB IDE, 1x250 GB IDE
OS - Windows 7 64 bit RC

BIOS - SATA configured as IDE, JMicron configured as IDE and latest BIOS installed / flashed.

I thought it was problem with Windows 7 installation and re-installed it after having deleted / recreated partition and formattated the 250 GB SATA HDD on which OS is installed.

I also performed the following tests to see if there were any problems.

a) Check the disk for errors using the Disk Management/Tools (which is chkdsk I guess) including check and recover bad sectors for the OS disk (on restart of machine) and also the 500 GB IDE data disk (no bad sectors found). The third 250 GB IDE disk is not having any data as of now. It is freshly formatted too.
b) Run Windows 7 memory diagnostic (no errors found).
c) As Windows 7 memory diagnostic checks only 4 GB of memory (as per Microsoft article), also ran three copies of Memtest (free edition) simultaneously giving each one of them 2 GB for testing (no errors found after more than 100% coverage for each of three Memtests).

I am totally lost as to what is it that takes Windows 7 RC 64 bit more than 20 minutes to load. Even if I use Safe mode (the verbose mode) to show the loading of drivers, it takes 10 minutes of showing "Starting Windows" with blank screen, another 5 minutes of "Starting Windows" with the Windows logo around and only after that it starts loading the drivers (it stops for a quite long time after loading CLASSPNP.SYS again).

Hi Esfu,

The first thing you have to do is strip the system.

Take out any usb devices not needed,
take out pci cards if they are there.
take out 6gb of ram and try to run it with 2gb

If that all doesn't change anything.

Take the disk with the OS out of your system, and try to install Win7 on the other empty disk.

Even though no bad sectors were found, the boot disk might be having a problem.

Make sure in the BIOS PNP OS is set to yes.

Check in the device manager that win7 indeed is installed as ACPI system.

If you did any OC, or set timings for the ram, set them back to default in the BIOS.

You have to exclude possibilities to get to the heart of the problem.

Good luck, and please post back.

greetz

esfu said:

Any ideas on what could be causing the problem will be highly appreciated as I am totally lost now having tried all the below mentioned tasks.

The machine configuration is as follows.

Motherboard - ASUS P5K PREMIUM/WIFI-AP LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel
Memory - 8 GB (Two kits of Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model PDC24G6400LLK)
HDD - 1x250 GB SATA (OS installed on this), 1x500 GB IDE, 1x250 GB IDE
OS - Windows 7 64 bit RC

BIOS - SATA configured as IDE, JMicron configured as IDE and latest BIOS installed / flashed.

I thought it was problem with Windows 7 installation and re-installed it after having deleted / recreated partition and formattated the 250 GB SATA HDD on which OS is installed.

I also performed the following tests to see if there were any problems.

a) Check the disk for errors using the Disk Management/Tools (which is chkdsk I guess) including check and recover bad sectors for the OS disk (on restart of machine) and also the 500 GB IDE data disk (no bad sectors found). The third 250 GB IDE disk is not having any data as of now. It is freshly formatted too.
b) Run Windows 7 memory diagnostic (no errors found).
c) As Windows 7 memory diagnostic checks only 4 GB of memory (as per Microsoft article), also ran three copies of Memtest (free edition) simultaneously giving each one of them 2 GB for testing (no errors found after more than 100% coverage for each of three Memtests).

I am totally lost as to what is it that takes Windows 7 RC 64 bit more than 20 minutes to load. Even if I use Safe mode (the verbose mode) to show the loading of drivers, it takes 10 minutes of showing "Starting Windows" with blank screen, another 5 minutes of "Starting Windows" with the Windows logo around and only after that it starts loading the drivers (it stops for a quite long time after loading CLASSPNP.SYS again).

Morning

Classpnp.sys monitors disk drives for load and it can suddenly cause extreme slow downs in start up. Its different than the slow degradation found over time. description and cure can be found here Disk Performance May Degrade Over Time

Hope this helps and if not let us know

Ken

I have the same problem on my Toshiba Satellite A215-S5818 laptop with dual core Turion x64 2ghz processor and 4gb ram....at least if my external Buffalo 1TB drive station is plugged in. Here is why:

When you boot Win7 checks for errors in your drives. If all your drives are NTFS it just checks the part where windows writes errors to the mbr and then goes on if there are no reported errors. However, if the drive is formatted in FAT, FAT16 or FAT32 it checks every single file, folder and then scans the freespace as well. If I unplug my 1TB (fat 32 formatted drive) windows 7 will boot a lot quicker, if I unplug my fat 32 formatted thumb drives, sd cards, etc. I can get Win 7 to boot in 20-30 seconds. Plugin the 4gb SD card and it takes 2 minutes, add to that a 8 GB usb thumb drive formatted to fat 32 and I am up to 4 minutes. Plug in my 1TB fat 32 formatted Buffalo drive and I am at 20 minutes.

If all else fails on the above, I almost gave up and went to the Bios and set it to restore default settings (even with a clean install and no modifications done to the Bios). After that, the drive was found and load time was quick and there was no latancy when jumping from window to window.

running win7 ult