New Hard Drive and Missing Tray Icons

[Don in San Antonio]

Greetings All,

I'm using Windows XP Home SP2 and I've noticed some strange things after
upgrading from an IDE drive to and SATA drive. Initially after
installing the new drive and cloning the old drive to the new one I was
amazed to see that the blue bar on Windows only traced half a bar then
disappear. I thought WOW! this new drive is really fast, but then I
noticed that there was a lot more delay during the blank screen stage of
the boot process and in the end, the time to boot up was possibly longer
than it had been with the old drive. A new problem also surfaced, some
of my tray icons were missing. In particular, the speaker icon was gone
along with some others.

I after visiting Microsoft's Knowledge base and expanding the speaker
driver again, the problem was still there. Then on a whim I decided to
run Microsoft Boot Vis. This made a significant difference. The blue
bar on Windows startup is back to four traces before disappearing and my
tray icons are back. Has anyone else had a similar problem and are
there any other optimizing utilities that might improve the boot process
further?

Thanks,
Don

 

[DL]

You dont need utilities, something is not right with your installation.
ie check your mobo manual for any specific setup instructions for a sata
drive.

 

[Don in San Antonio]

You dont need utilities, something is not right with your installation.
ie check your mobo manual for any specific setup instructions for a sata
drive.

I'm pretty sure the sata drive is set up correctly and I don't see the
connection between drive setup and icons not showing up on the tool
tray. I think it has to do with timing and the order things are loaded
during Windows startup. Thanks for the input anyway.

Don

 

[DL]

To put it another way, something is wrong with your win installation and its
setup.

 

[Don in San Antonio]

| To put it another way, something is wrong with your win installation
and its
| setup.

Just out of curiosity I took a look on Google for this issue and here's
what I found. According toTech-Pro.net, missing tray icons is a known
bug in Windows. Here's a link if you're interested in looking further
http://www.tech-pro.net/howto_013.html I guess my use of Boot Vis is
going to be about a close as I can get to a solution to the problem.
Here's an extract from the Tech-Pro.net page in case you'd rather not
browse there. Thanks for the feedback.
Don

begin extract ...

Applies to: Windows XP
Symptoms

After you start the computer, one or more of the icons that should be
present in the system tray (notification area) of the Taskbar are often
missing.

Cause

The cause of this problem is not known, but it's almost certainly a bug
in Windows XP.

Solution

There is no known solution, but there are workarounds that may reduce
the frequency of this annoying occurrence.

end of extract

 

[DL]

I read the article, cannot say I've ever experienced this.
I'd still suggest reading your mobo manual regarding sata usage.
There are many more reports of problems when cloning an ide drive to a sata
drive.

 

[Don in San Antonio]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 and the BIOS has been updated
to F11. By the way, this motherboard has Gigabyte's Dual BIOS feature
where it keeps two copies of the BIOS just in case one gets corrupted.
I've been through the BIOS setup for SATA and there's not much there.
All you need to do is turn it on and set the boot drive to SATA. The
SATA controller is an Sil3112. It's one of the older ones with 150
mb/sec transfer rate. The drive itself has a jumper installed to limit
the speed to 150 instead of the newer 300 mb/sec rate. The drive
cloning took place without a hitch.

I should have mentioned that this loss of tray icons has happened in the
past and just popped up again after installing the new hard drive. As I
said in my first post, running Boot Vis fixed the missing icon problem
and also seems to have speeded up the boot process. My guess (pure
speculation) is that Norton Antivirus needs to load first and if that
doesn't happen, then it messes up the timing for other programs that are
being loaded during startup.

Don


|I read the article, cannot say I've ever experienced this.
| I'd still suggest reading your mobo manual regarding sata usage.
| There are many more reports of problems when cloning an ide drive to a
sata
| drive.

 

[Frank]

Gigabyte===control + F1 will give you more
settings in the BIOS/CMOS.