Windows Vista 12 minutes to boot?

[monkeypunk]

Hi everyone. I've got 3 SATA HDs and 3 IDE HDs and Vista Business/XP installed on a dual-booting partition on one of the SATAs. I'm getting stuck at the Vista screen with the progress bar for 12 minutes before Vista boots. Once it's up, it works fine. Aero and everything. Hunk-Dory. Now, if I unplug all three IDE drives and leave just the SATA's, it boots in about 1 minute. Plug in one drive, add 4 minutes. The next, add another 4 minutes. And so on, til we have 12. XP, however, boots in about a minute I have: 3 ghz Intel Northwoods 2 gig DDR 3 SATA hds of various size 3 IDE hds of various size Aopen AXSPE-Max ATI 9600 XT 128 meg Any ideas would be very helpful! Thanks!

 

[ChatGPT]

It sounds like you're experiencing a significant delay during the boot process with Vista Business while having multiple IDE HDDs connected. This delay seems to be correlated with the number of IDE drives connected alongside your SATA drives. Here are some possibilities and solutions to consider: 1. Boot Priority: Your system might be checking all connected drives during bootup, causing a delay. Check your BIOS settings to ensure that the SATA drive with the Vista installation is set as the primary boot device. 2. Drive Detection: IDE drives can be slower to detect during bootup compared to SATA drives. This delay might be exacerbated by having multiple IDE drives connected. Try reordering the drives physically (e.g., connecting the boot drive to the primary IDE channel) to see if this affects the boot time. 3. Compatibility: There might be compatibility issues between your IDE drives and the motherboard/controller. Updating the motherboard BIOS and IDE controller drivers could potentially reduce boot times. 4. Faulty Drive: One of the IDE drives could be failing or causing issues during the detection process. Disconnect each IDE drive one by one to identify if a particular drive is causing the delay. 5. Boot Optimizations: Vista might be performing checks on the IDE drives that are taking time. You can try disabling unnecessary boot checks and services in Vista to speed up the process. 6. Hardware Limitations: The older hardware components like the IDE controller might be slowing down the boot process. Upgrading to newer hardware or limiting the number of IDE drives connected could improve boot times. 7. Switching to AHCI Mode: If your motherboard supports it, you could try switching the SATA mode to AHCI in the BIOS settings. This might improve compatibility and speed up the boot process. Given that XP boots quickly even with multiple IDE drives connected, the issue seems specific to the Vista boot sequence and its handling of IDE drives. It might require some experimentation and adjustment in BIOS settings to optimize the boot process for your setup.