Windows XP XP Pro Slow Startup after HD Upgrade

[Daryl Gibbs]

After attempting a hard disk upgrade, XP takes about 30min to startup.

PC details-:
Asus L3C laptop, 1.8GHz P4, 1G Ram, 40GByte IDE disk.
Bios is the latest obtained from Asus (although dated 2003).
Bios disk settings set to Auto.
The L3C supports Ultra ATA/100 disk interface

Upgrade attempt is to replace existing 40G drive with new Seagate 160G ST9160821A.

I have attempted to clone disk using several different programs (Segate DiscWizard, Norton Ghost) using a USB connection to new drive. I have also attempted a start from scratch using the Asus XP recovery CDs with the new drive installed. Both these processes complete OK.

All attempts to boot with the new disk installed produce the same results.

On power up there is 15sec of initial disk activity and the XP startup is displayed. After this the horizontal progress scroll bar becomes very slow (moves a bit every 15-30sec) with a short burst of disk activity.

Once XP boots, the contents of the disk seems to be as as expected. I can even copy a 100MByte directory in what I would call normal time.

 

[Waynos_Face]

Hi,

I'm not too clear on what you have done, did you replace the Hard Drive in your PC with one that works via USB???

If so then this is why its so slow as the transfet speed and amount of data that can be shifted is a lot lot slower than using IDe or SATA.

 

[Daryl Gibbs]

Sorry my original post was not as clear as it should have been.


I only used the USB during the cloning of the existing 40G drive as the laptop only has one internal IDE interface for a single HD. Once this was finished, I removed the 40G drive, and installed the new 160G drive in the laptop on the internal IDE.

For the new cloned HD, I made the partitions the same as the existing 40G drive (C:23G FAT32, D:14G NTFS, rest unallocated).

With the cloned disk installed in the laptop it takes over 2 Hrs to boot.

I also tried installing the new drive in the laptop and doing a system restore on the blank HD using the Asus CDs. This just puts the original XP onto the new disk. The actual system restore process takes about what I would expect (about 10min).

With just the original XP on the new disk, it takes about 30min to boot.

 

[JaLing]

I reckon your drives have different cluster allocations.
I'd suggest not doing a restore..... instead do a fresh install using a installation CD, not a recovery one.
Some recovery and cloning software does not respan the image to fit correctly, this causes slow access and reading times on the written data.

 

[Daryl Gibbs]

Thanks Ja

I did as you suggested and that worked.

I had to use a Windows disk from another PC as Asus only supplied the recovery disk - hopefully I will still be able to use my old product key to re-register. Seems the recovery disk is only designed for the HD size that came with the PC. It was also forcing the first partition to FAT32 which I have now changed to NTFS.

 

[JaLing]

You should have no issues re-registering... if you have to contact MS just explain your HD died

Glad to help