Very slow startup

[rafinney]

I have been running Windows XP Pro (retail) on my desktop machine for
some time. I have a rig with two hard drives. Recently one hard drive
(the second physical disk, not the boot disk) failed. It was covered
under warranty and replaced. But ever since then I have been having
trouble with XP shutting down and starting up.

It takes about 3 minutes for shutdown - the system just hangs at
"Windows is shutting down." It takes even longer - 5 minutes - at
startup. The system hangs at "Windows is starting up."

I have tried everything I can think of but no luck. I have done a
couple of defrags - online and offline. I have used msconfig and
disabled all startup items. Nothing helps.

I should mention that right before the second physical disk failed, I
got a lot of disk thrashing so maybe something else is corrupt. All of
my system restore points have been wiped out so that is not an option.
I have tried a repair in place installation but also did nothing. Last
good configuration does nothing.

It seems as though XP is looking for something when it is waiting.
There is no hard disk activity at this point.

So it seems that I may have to reformat and start all over but I have
so many programs that it will be take me forever to do that. So if
anyone has any other suggestions, I would be grateful.

 

[OShah]

I have been running Windows XP Pro (retail) on my desktop machine for
some time. I have a rig with two hard drives. Recently one hard drive
(the second physical disk, not the boot disk) failed. It was covered
under warranty and replaced. But ever since then I have been having
trouble with XP shutting down and starting up.

It takes about 3 minutes for shutdown - the system just hangs at
"Windows is shutting down." It takes even longer - 5 minutes - at
startup. The system hangs at "Windows is starting up."

I have tried everything I can think of but no luck. I have done a
couple of defrags - online and offline. I have used msconfig and
disabled all startup items. Nothing helps.

I should mention that right before the second physical disk failed, I
got a lot of disk thrashing so maybe something else is corrupt. All of
my system restore points have been wiped out so that is not an option.
I have tried a repair in place installation but also did nothing. Last
good configuration does nothing.

It seems as though XP is looking for something when it is waiting.
There is no hard disk activity at this point.

So it seems that I may have to reformat and start all over but I have
so many programs that it will be take me forever to do that. So if
anyone has any other suggestions, I would be grateful.

http://aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.php
gives some ideas.

Try tweaking the Reg value: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet
WaitToKillServiceTimeout [REG_SZ] (that's the timeout in milliseconds
before Windows Destroys an unresponsive service).

Are you getting any Event log errors (particularly in System or
Application)?



--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
oshah
Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Error Reporting -> Choose Programs
-> Do not report errors for these programs:

Acrobat.exe
waol.exe

------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

[rafinney]

I have been running Windows XP Pro (retail) on my desktop machine for
some time. I have a rig with two hard drives. Recently one hard drive
(the second physical disk, not the boot disk) failed. It was covered
under warranty and replaced. But ever since then I have been having
trouble with XP shutting down and starting up.

It takes about 3 minutes for shutdown - the system just hangs at
"Windows is shutting down." It takes even longer - 5 minutes - at
startup. The system hangs at "Windows is starting up."

I have tried everything I can think of but no luck. I have done a
couple of defrags - online and offline. I have used msconfig and
disabled all startup items. Nothing helps.

I should mention that right before the second physical disk failed, I
got a lot of disk thrashing so maybe something else is corrupt. All of
my system restore points have been wiped out so that is not an option.
I have tried a repair in place installation but also did nothing. Last
good configuration does nothing.

It seems as though XP is looking for something when it is waiting.
There is no hard disk activity at this point.

So it seems that I may have to reformat and start all over but I have
so many programs that it will be take me forever to do that. So if
anyone has any other suggestions, I would be grateful.

http://aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.php
gives some ideas.

Try tweaking the Reg value: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet
WaitToKillServiceTimeout [REG_SZ] (that's the timeout in milliseconds
before Windows Destroys an unresponsive service).

Are you getting any Event log errors (particularly in System or
Application)?

Thanks for the helpful response. I think I have found the source of
most of my problems. I opened up services.msc and I saw some SP2
services that shouldn't have been there since I returned to my system
to a pre-SP state. So this got me thinking that things were not "pure"
even though SP2 was not showing as installed.

After reinstalling SP2, my system immediately booted up much quicker,
without the hanging. Shutdown remains slow.

I will try some of the tweaks and see what happens. At this point,
unless my system performance degrades, I think I will let it go. I can
live with a slower shutdown.