Homepage
Forum
Drivers
HMM
MTM
Feed
A couple of days ago I booted XP for the first time in weeks, and then, and ever since then, booting XP is taking about twice as long as it used to (my linux install, on the same disk, is unaffected).
The XP logo with the pulsing progress bar comes up as usual, then when the screen goes blank again (and the mouse pointer appears) it stays blank for about a minute. during this time the hard drive spins and rests in a rythmic, one second on, one second off (or thereabouts) pattern. finally the login screen appears, but once i've entered my password it's back to the blank rythmic spinning up/down for another minute or so. it never used to do this - usually XP will boot to the desktop noticeably faster than linux, but now it takes about twice as long.
i hadn't installed any new software to the windows partition (at least, not that i can remember) prior to this happening, and since it started i have installed SP2, updated the BIOS and a couple of other IBM software bits, all making no difference. does anyone know what could be causing it? at first i thought it might be the disk, but as my linux install is fine, and once windows finally boots it also seems fine, that seems unlikely.
i haven't installed any of the firmware updates for the hdd because of lots of scare stories i read about it (i'm a gutless chicken in that respect
) - could it be related to that? (but if so, surely it would affect linux, too?)