Ridiculous periods to boot up
It seems my primary laptop is taking ridiculous amounts of time to boot up. Almost 20 minutes until everything is fully loaded. Interestingly, it seems to take 5 minutes alone to boot through the BIOS (which the original BIOS loadup screen where it says "press F10 to enter setup". Previously it would take about 15 minutes to load everything, but
( Read more... )
1) You have a bad boot sector on your hard drive, or other issue. I would try, in this order: a) Defrag B) run a check disk (from start>run "cmd" in the black window type without the quotes "chkdsk /f /r" unless it's vista then just the "chkdsk" and reboot and let it run, likely take hours, c) re-create the master boot record, makes the machine re-identify the boot seq. It's a bitch and frankly your better off rebuilding the machine as long as you can pull the data off it.
2) Bad hardware - there were 2 runs of bas capacitors that made it to the mass market. They cause odd problems leading to system failure. You can rebuild it but the system get's flaky and will continue to fail. System board replacement is the only solution. The time frame for your hardware puts it in the time frame. (you mentioned a 2007 bios as the latest, so I am guessing it's from 2005-2006).
It is most likely just a case of OS rot and you can keep it going with the defrag and check disk. A re-load of the OS over the tope of the existing on might also work (so you don't have to wipe the drive, but the drive wipe and rebuild is the better option).
Reply
I've already had a bad motherboard on this thing and it was replaced completely last year (2008) so it hopefully won't be a bad board from 2006.
I'm just going to run it into the ground and replace it with a desktop running Windows 7. It will be a reward for getting through these exams!
Reply
Admittedly slow boot through BIOS (and everythign else) is usually faulty ram, or faulty mobo. The boot sector on the drive is possible, although that shouldn't slow down the BIOS, unless there's a fault with your drive controller. Easiest way to (non-destructively) test this, is to disconnect both drives, and boot from a windows cd.
The microsoft website used to have a ram checking application that you could write onto a floppy disk, and boot from. basically a DOS app that reads and writes to/from memory, and throws different patterns at the ram, to ensure that what's written to ram, is the same as when read back from ram. Depending on the amount of ram, it may take an hour or so, but it's worth checking, as replacement ram should be dirt cheap for a machine of that age.
Reply
A while ago I got a CD-ROM that booted a version of Linux and then ran some intensive hardware testing. it's how I diagnosed a motherboard problem in the past. I might have to find that again.
I'm still keen to ditch the computer and replace it, though. Only thing that's stopping me is the firewire port on it - I need a portable computer with firewire for recording the podcast!
Reply
Leave a comment