Thinkpads Forum

I've noticed that when I have a second hard drive (or nothing) instead of the DVD-RW in the Ultrabay, Windows 7 delays for about 30-40 seconds between when it starts booting from the hard drive and when Windows displays its boot screen.

I suspect that this issue might occur for other users of Thinkpads with removable optical drives (mine is a T61p, 6459-CTO); not sure about other versions of Windows (I'm using Win7 Pro, 64-bit).

If the DVD-RW is installed when booting, there is no delay.

In the Event Viewer, each delayed boot is accompanied by Event 7026, Service Control Manager:

The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load:
cdrom


So, I'm wondering whether anyone has found a software/firmware/configuration solution to this (admittedly minor) issue?

The obvious other solutions are to just put up with the delay or to leave the DVD installed. (I currently have my old Vista HDD in the Ultrabay; I keep finding application preferences I missed.)

(Tried to Google the issue, but came up with only people having serious trouble. Couldn't find "boot-start" on this board.)

Go into bios and look at the order of the boot devices. if your ultra bay is listed before your internal hard disk it looks for boot information on that drive first. You can change it to boot from the hard drive first, of course when you want to boot from the cd drive you will have to change it back.

Or you can hit F12 when it starts to boot and select the internal hard drive from the list presented.

Scott

Thanks, Scott. I somehow had convinced myself the flicker from the HDD access LED had meant that it had already started booting from the HDD. Well, that and the message in the event log which I guess doesn't amount to much after all.