onefistedboxer

Hi, i am experiencing a suspiciously long startup time during the part with the three green bars going across the screen, about a minute and a half. The rest of my startup is very fast. My computer is reasonably high-end (2gb ram, e6750 cpu) but not overclocked and is fully defragmented. The long startup has been present since i first got the pc about a year ago and my current efforts suggest that it is not due to any software i’ve installed. My motherboard is a p5w dh deluxe and i’m running Vista 32bit SP1. This is what i’ve done so far:

1. I have trimmed all my non-microsoft services and startup items down to a minimum, along with unused drivers (through autoruns), although the wait is still there whether i use diagnostic startup or even safemode.

2. Furthermore I have checked the event viewer for startup problems. The events which denote my startup time have warning or critical symbols but there are no other warnings referring to specific trouble processes, therefore I do not believe my slow boot is the result of startup applications or services.

3. I have tried selecting “os boot information” in ms-config to find a trouble driver, but all the drivers load quickly when they are listed, during the period with the long wait (when the green bar is usually loading) there is little information, it reads something like “checking hard disk C”.

4. I have run the command line utility to check all system files for errors, but it was fine.

5. I have tried disabling all non-essential devices in my motherboard bios to find any possible problem but this makes no difference.

6. I finally created a Vista recovery disk to run the startup repair utility, but the test does not last longer than a few seconds before telling me that i must remove a recently installed removable device (or words to that effect). I then checked the log which defined the device as “diskdrive0”. I have tried again with nothing but my mouse/keyboard connected but it does not help, therefore i presume this is referring to my hard drive which is described as being in location 0 in the device manager. I have run chkdsk reasonably recently with no errors, but not within the past month. My hard drive is in ahci mode. I believe a possible explanation may lie in the way it has been setup.

I’ve been trying to sort this out for quite a while so i’ve probably tried some other things as well, if you don’t have any ideas it would even be helpful if you could just give me an idea about what Windows is doing at this point in the boot process.

Thanks in advance,
Ben