XP Booting

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Guest

Good evening

Could someone please give me some ideas as to why my pc shows a black screen on boot up for about 3 minutes. Your help in trying find this problem would be much appreciated

Thank you.
 
I see this after it comes up with the Wondows XP Home Edition screen with the green bar

Thanks.
 
It's not unusual to see such a screen for 10 seconds or so but 3 minutes is
a long time.

Did XP come preinstalled on your system, if no, when you moved to XP did you
upgrade over a previous operating system and which operating system or did
you install XP clean? How old is your system, have you always had this
problem, are there any things you've recently changed, hardware, software,
etc., have you always had this problem or is this a recent issue, what are
the specs on your system, processor, memory, hard drive, graphics card, etc.
and what is installed, specifically firewall and antivirus, some can cause a
delay on bootup?
 
XP came pre installed. When the problem first happened i tried installing windows over the top of the current one. I have had the pc of a year. Since the start of the year, i got a win98 boot floppy from work and used that to format the c drive before completely reinstalling XP. I think it is to do with some software i have installed but i can never remember which. I run Mcafee anti virus.

When i completely reinstalled XP, i installed my software and it happened after reinstalling something but I can never remember what it was

Hopefully there is a way around it
 
You're only way out of this is to start removing applications one by one and
seeing if the problem goes away, start with McAfee, if you have a separate
firewall, that should be next. It may take more than one reboot to see if
the problem has gone away, at least with regard to antivirus and firewall as
these usually require a reboot after the removal and the process is still
continuing on the reboot, so, reboot a second or even a third time to be
sure.

This probably has nothing to do with the problem but in the future, do not
use Windows 9x tools and utilities for XP and that includes the 9x format
tool. If you wish to format the system drive and start over, do so as
follows:

The information below assumes you have an XP CD and not a manufacturer's
custom OEM or recovery CD. Since XP cam preinstalled, if you don't have a
CD, you still don't need to use a 9x floppy to format as the manufacturer's
recovery routine usually formats the drive.

Assuming your system is set to boot from the CD-ROM drive, boot with the XP
CD in the drive. If it isn't or you are not sure, you need to enter the
system's BIOS. When you boot the system, the first screen usually has
instructions that if you wish to enter setup press a specific key, when you
see that, do so. Then you will have to navigate to the boot sequence, if
the CD-ROM drive is not first line, set it first in the boot sequence. Save
your settings and exit with the XP CD in the drive. The system will reboot.

A few screens into the boot process, if you see the message on the boot
screen to "Press any key in order to boot from the CD," do so.

After loading drivers and files, you should be taken to a screen with
the following:

To Setup Windows XP now, press ENTER.
To Repair a Windows XP Installation using Recovery Console press R.
To Quit setup without installing Windows XP, press F3.

In your case, press ENTER.

Agree to the License agreement by pressing F8.

You will then be taken to a screen with two options.

To repair the selected Windows XP installation press R.
To continue installing a fresh copy of Windows XP without repairing,
press ESC.

This will bring you to a partition map where you
can delete, create and format partitions.
Select the drive you wish to format, delete the partition, then create a new
partition, format as desired and continue with XP installation.
 
Thanks. I have the oem edition worse luck. I'll have a look at the recovery console thing later and see what happens,
 
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