From display of logo to log-in screen is taking from 2 minutes to 10 minutes. (It caries from boot to boot.) HDD light is so active it seems to burn continuously. It looks like defrag, but neither Windows nor Auslogics defrag has scheduled tasks.
CCleaner shows nothing in Startup that could be an "activity."
Where or how can I find out what Windows was doing all this time?
My first thought would be going here.
Optimize Windows 7
Pay close attention to # 7 & 8
Please read instruction carefully and let us know what you decided to do and the results.
Hello Mac have you tried looking in msconfig on the start up tab?
Optimize Windows 7[2]=Performance Maintenance < point 7 and I like method 3 in the sub tutorial
Oops sory Bear we must have been posting at the same time
Just checked startup items with msconfig. There is nothing there that isn't shown by CCleaner. They are all things like MSSE, Adobe ARM and Speed Launcher, Winpower Agent.
Nothing that could account for 5 minutes of disk activity during bootup. The same with servises - they use memory (and a bit of bootup time) but nothing on this scale.
EDIT: What I am looking for is a log file to see what was done during the boot process. I can then refer to the timestamps to see what took so long.
If you can't find/fix the issue with the suggestions already given, you could use these tutorials to see if you can find the problem:
1) Boot in Safe Mode
Safe Mode
2) Do a Clean Startup
Troubleshoot Application Conflicts by Performing a Clean Startup
3) Gather a Startup trace
Gathering a Startup, Shutdown, Sleep, Hibernate, or Reboot Trace
Will try Startup trace, and also procmon boot log and see where the delay is.
Event Viewer via Control Panel/Administrative Tools may be worth a gander. Shut down the computer, wait an hour, and then boot up. After the computer settles down, go to the Event Viewer and there will be a list of Critical, Errors, et al. that may have populated within the last hour. If there is, then your investigation begins.
Hmm, Event Viewer shows lots and lots of disk errors and warnings from this morning.
1) I can't remember what time I rebooted this morning and had the problem, so I can't relate to event viewer times..
2) I was having a problem with an HDD that was "disappearing" while copying a file to it.
3) Booted with Partition Wizard disk - the Linux boot section reported lack of response from that HDD and when running showed the disk as non-existent.
4) Fiddled with cables to HDD - stopped disappearing and boot time is back to normal.
But if the disk was giving problems I can't see Windows spending 5 minutes with disk activity trying to get it going. Twenty to thirty seconds, yes, minutes, no.
I will just have to look at all the logs after tomorrow's boot - if it is slow! It is difficult when sometimes it boots normal and sometimes with the long delay of disk activity. And I am not exaggerating the 10 minutes - I make a cup of tea and drink it while catching up with the news on TV during boot.
We shall see.
Hello, a hardware problem CAN cause this.
For example, i had a damaged velociraptor with random I/O errors, sometimes it was working perfectly, sometimes i wasn't able to read/write on some blocks of the hard drive.
I didn't had as much problems you have actually because my system partition was not on this drive.
An other similar problem i had was on a 7 years old computer, the SATA cable got damaged (i don't know how) and the drive was sometime not deteced, same situation, it was not the system drive, so it was not causing problems during boot.
Please note(1) that you may be able to avoid some problems in the future by making sure the cable never do a 90° fold, it may cause data lose and/or make the drive not work properly. If you need for a reason to do a 90°, you should take a cable with the 90° angle part already made on it (like on this picture, with one side straight, the other turning at 90°)
(1) Source : Western digital hard drive documentation and Kingston's SSD documentation
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