unusual slow startup behavior, any thoughts?

[ahashmi]

I have an X41 Tablet running windows XP sp3. the machine is older, but i am still fond of it. lately, it has been exhibiting some unusual behavior at startup.

When i power on the machine, the IBM splash screen displays, then the windows XP progress bar screen, then the screen goes black and the cursor can be seen in the center. Normally, this may only occur momentarily and then the blue windows XP welcome screen appears. Instead, now that black screen with the cursor remains for an unusually long period of time, like several minutes, before transistioning to the blue welcome screen. If i allow the startup to continue, XP runs, but runs incredibly s-l-o-w.

When i notice the black screen lingering for more than a second or two, i force a shutdown with the power button and reboot. I usually have to repeat this once more before the startup returns to its normal behavior. On the third time, the startup behaves normally, and XP operates just fine.

I am wondering if the hard drive may be failing? The machine is at least 4 years old, i think (i inherited it). I'd like to keep the machine around to play with from time to time, but i'm not sure what is causing this behavior. Any thoughts? Any advice? Thanks much.

[K0LO]

I agree with your suspicion. If the hard disk has bad sectors it may read, re-read, and re-read a certain file or files as Windows is starting up.

If you still have PC-Doctor on the machine, run a thorough disk check. Preferably, do this from the version on the recovery partition. Otherwise, schedule a disk check, reboot, and let it run. Disk problems are one of the first things you should rule out.

[ahashmi]

thanks for the suggestion. I had completely forgotten about PC Doctor. Sure enough, it reported that the harddrive has two bad sectors. Any suggestions on what to do at this point? Are this something i could repair myself? I'm sure there is plenty of help elsewhere online, but if any has some good ideas, i'm very open to them.

Thanks again for the help. I have used this forum a few times, and it has been very useful!

[RealBlackStuff]

For such cases I use HDD Regenerator from http://www.dposoft.net/
Works like a charm.

[craigmontHunter]

We had a simmilar problem with our desktop, and Chkdsk fixed it right away.

Good luck.

[A31]

Run to "msconfig", go to the "Startup" tab at the top of the window, and un-check items like RealPlayer, Adobe Reader, Google stuff etc... then restart and hopefully your startup will be faster