Slow boot due to excessive "disk init" time...

[Guest]

I just installed a new WD 40G EIDE drive on my system, reinstalled XP/SP2 and
it works fine... However, I have noted that boot times are all over the map.
One time 20 seconds (great) the next 68 seconds (yuck). No real pattern at
all..

I installed a copy of MS's old Bootvis and it informs me that the culprit
(~40 seconds) is "disk init" time - before any drivers, etc. are loaded...

Is there anything I can do at the Windows level to speed disk
initialization? Or is this a drive issue?

 

[Guest]

BTW - boot time is from POST to responsive desktop... (i.e. not everything
has loaded but the menus work and I can load programs, shut down/restart,
etc...)

 

[R. McCarty]

Depending on how your IDE controllers are populated, you
might need to change the Primary/Secondary in Device Mgr
so that unused connections (M/S) are set to None. This can
help XP startup as it allows XP to skip the scan for devices.
Open Device Manager, IDE ATAPI/ATA Controllers and
then open Primary/Secondary and click the Advanced (TAB).
Look in the Device Type field, toggle unused taps from Auto
Detection to None.

 

[Guest]

OK - here's what appears to be going on: This machine has an AMI BIOS and
there are two places in which one can designate boot drive order.. One is via
ESC and the main BIOS interface and the other is via F9 and a separate dialog
that lets one override (?) the main selection. Apparently, I had the main
selection set properly (i.e. boot HD first) but I had the second one set to
boot CD-ROM first. After setting the override to HD, boot times are
consistently at ~25 seconds...