Slow POST

[ElJerid]

Without any apparent reason, post duration suddenly increased today from +/-
3 sec to 30 sec. During this time, the screen displays the normal Asus
welcome screen and there is no disc activity. After that, XP starts and
works normally.
Any idea for the reason of this behaviour? Could it be a low battery
symptom?
Thanks for advice.

(2 years old PC with Asus P4P800 - P4 3.2 Ghz - 2x 512 MB paired Corsair)

 

[Paul]

Without any apparent reason, post duration suddenly increased today from +/-
3 sec to 30 sec. During this time, the screen displays the normal Asus
welcome screen and there is no disc activity. After that, XP starts and
works normally.
Any idea for the reason of this behaviour? Could it be a low battery
symptom?
Thanks for advice.

(2 years old PC with Asus P4P800 - P4 3.2 Ghz - 2x 512 MB paired Corsair)

I can think of a couple possibilities.

On some Asus boards, on occasion you'll get a "failed due to overclock"
message at POST, implying that the last time the computer was run,
the BIOS recorded a crash. The board then proceeds to reset all the settings,
including doing lame things, like enabling the controller you never use
and normally have disabled. So you have to go into the BIOS and
correct all the stuff. That particular board, I gave up on overclocking,
because it was such a PITA.

Recent boards are better now, and are smarter about what they reset. They;ll
reset the CPU external clock to nominal, but leave a lot of the other stuff
alone.

Some people are not aware that a "failed due to overclock" was detected,
and suddenly find a change in their machine. Imagine, for example, the
boot order got changed when the settings were reset, and the owner of the
machine wasn't the one who set it up. That leads to some unnecessary
grief.

As you point out, a bad battery can affect the settings. But then you might
expect the RTC clock to be reset as well. For example, just yesterday,
I took my A7N8X-E out of storage and fired it up, to be greeted by
a "Jan 1, 2002" date. Leaving the computer unplugged means the battery
doesn't last for too many years. Maybe three or four if you're lucky.

Paul

 

[ElJerid]

I can think of a couple possibilities.

On some Asus boards, on occasion you'll get a "failed due to overclock"
message at POST, implying that the last time the computer was run,
the BIOS recorded a crash. The board then proceeds to reset all the
settings,
including doing lame things, like enabling the controller you never use
and normally have disabled. So you have to go into the BIOS and
correct all the stuff. That particular board, I gave up on overclocking,
because it was such a PITA.

Recent boards are better now, and are smarter about what they reset.
They;ll
reset the CPU external clock to nominal, but leave a lot of the other
stuff
alone.

Some people are not aware that a "failed due to overclock" was detected,
and suddenly find a change in their machine. Imagine, for example, the
boot order got changed when the settings were reset, and the owner of the
machine wasn't the one who set it up. That leads to some unnecessary
grief.

As you point out, a bad battery can affect the settings. But then you
might
expect the RTC clock to be reset as well. For example, just yesterday,
I took my A7N8X-E out of storage and fired it up, to be greeted by
a "Jan 1, 2002" date. Leaving the computer unplugged means the battery
doesn't last for too many years. Maybe three or four if you're lucky.

Paul

Thanks Paul. I had indeed the overclock problem you describe in my "early
Asus year", but this was not the case this time. This morning I found the
(stupid) reason of the slow post. Some days ago, I purchased a Canon PM600
all-in-one.
Normally when I stop my PC in the evening (night), I also switch off the
Canon, but since two days I did not. And then it toke 30 sec more to post. I
guess the system had to find and initialize all the usb items in the AIO,
being card reader, printer and scanner, and this takes a lot of time.
This morning while booting, the Canon was switched off and the PC booted
normally in 3 sec.
However, I still don't understand why finding usb devices needs so much post
time...

 

[kony]

Thanks Paul. I had indeed the overclock problem you describe in my "early
Asus year", but this was not the case this time. This morning I found the
(stupid) reason of the slow post. Some days ago, I purchased a Canon PM600
all-in-one.
Normally when I stop my PC in the evening (night), I also switch off the
Canon, but since two days I did not. And then it toke 30 sec more to post. I
guess the system had to find and initialize all the usb items in the AIO,
being card reader, printer and scanner, and this takes a lot of time.
This morning while booting, the Canon was switched off and the PC booted
normally in 3 sec.
However, I still don't understand why finding usb devices needs so much post
time...

It's probably polling and trying to boot from them.
Try fiddling with the bios settings for USB boot devices, to
see if after installing a bootable flash card in it, you can
boot the system to that... as it might be a convenient way
to run some things like a bios flasher or memtest86+, legacy
DOS utils, etc... even a bart's PE environment in case
windows craps itself and needs help.

 

[Plato]

Without any apparent reason, post duration suddenly increased today from +/-
3 sec to 30 sec. During this time, the screen displays the normal Asus
welcome screen and there is no disc activity. After that, XP starts and
works normally.
Any idea for the reason of this behaviour? Could it be a low battery
symptom?

No it's surely NOT a low battery problem. It may, however, be a hard
drive or CDrom drive problem that the mobo is trying to detect.