Boot time = 1 Hour +

Hi,

I have a dell dimension 8400 desktop, windows xp, srvce pack 2, 4 gb mem.
It takes at least an hour for the HD to boot up. During boot, little HD light generally blinks about every two seconds with a minimum of chatter. Sometimes it will chatter for 5 to ten second bursts. Each time this occurs, a little more of the os and startup apps get loaded.

After everything is loaded, click on any app icon and it could take a good five minutes to open. All the while the hd light continues to blink about every 2 seconds, with the occasional short burst of read/load ( I assume that’s what it’s doing).

Once a program is open, it can run relatively smoothly (I can move around in firefox and make it do things).
But, opening win explorer can take 10 minutes.
HD/light continues to act in same manner.

Ran virus and spyware scans – nothing

Could be important to note, just prior to problem, windows media player choked on a known, good vid file, system locked, had to power down. On any following attempts to reboot, sometimes receive an error message to the effect that windows either powered down unexpectedly or a device was disconnected, choose how you want to start, etc, etc

HD suddenly going bad? Is it just trying to search thru a corrupted file structure? Memory?

All suggestions appreciated.

Thanks!

/p

Run scandisc and defrag.

Yes I agree alsawys check the connections. Sata always seems loose.

ok, i'll try all of this and report back, thnx

the os is 32 bit
same number of processes as always, but i'll try msconfig, as well

thkz!

right, zorg, always check the physical stuff first, i'll do that. then see if i can restore from safe mode, then move on if necessary.
there are so many troubleshooting steps one can take in such a situation, sometimes its hard to know which order to try them in.

After doing all that others have offered...get a copy of SpinRite 6.0 and run it.

hold on, my knees may be buckling a bit it just booted pretty quickly...standby..i'm backing up to external while i have the opp, then i'll shut down and reboot.
what i did:
checked cable connections, looked and felt good
pulled half the memory out, no change
system restore, windows couldn't complete it
unplugged all usb periphs, turned off all non-windows srvices, no change
defrag got to 58% and then stalled, no change
every reboot took almost an hour and a half and subsequent commands to open apps could take 5 minutes to execute

then ran ScanDisk from xp's tools
told me to shut windows down first cause it needed access to certain files
clicked restart, screen dark for an hour, then suddenly booted up, apps seem to open ok so far, albeit a little slower, but that could be cause I went from 4 gb mem to two during troubleshooting

if this all goes haywire, I'll be back. If it turns out to be fixed, I'll run spinright and probably buy/install another good internal drive cause this one is 3+ years, no telling when it might go

this is a great site and you've all been very helpful thanks much

/P

its booted normally 3 times in row
normally only time i evr see a cursor is for about 2 seconds early in boot process along with a dell trdemark

Did Dell send you the same type of motherboard you already had? Did that fix the problem?