Windows spends AGES starting up all of a sudden

[Jay Dee]

Heya

I got my new pc a few days ago.
Didnt buy a new harddrive with it but kept my old one which i formatted and did a clean install of XP on. When booting my computer during the countless reboots needed to install all the security upgrades, SP2, etc, windows always booted very fast, and it booted straight into the desktop without me needing to click on a user to enter windows as.
Then suddenly it started pausing on the "Windows is starting up..." screen, the one with a cyan middle and dark blue upper and bottom edges. It pauses on this screen for almost 1 minute, when it suddenly boots. The harddrive is completely silent during this pause, then goes into a wild chatter when windows starts booting again. Also, when it boots now it automatically goes to the screen where you have to select what user to log on as...

Does anyone know whats causing this ? I figured it could be some software i installed, but the only things i installed during the uptime between fast-boot and paused-boot was daemon tools and azureus, and i have uninstalled both those to no avail now.

[Bail_w]

some information on your hard drive? brand,IDE, 5400rpm or 7200rpm etc?

[Jay Dee]

WD120GB SATA1 drive, 7200 rpm, not sure about its cache

its fairly old (4 years), but tbh i didnt consider the hd as the culprit since its only during the welcome screen that things pause for a minute, i figured it was some software related to the OS

Come think of it, a similar problem happened on my old pc (once in a while, very rarely though) but on that pc it never progressed past that screen, i even left it in that state for 8 hours while i was at work once and xp never started up.

[Jay Dee]

I uninstalled the hellgate london demo, as i was done playing it, and now my xp boots up in seconds again. It still requires me to manually select which account to log on to (and theres only 1) but it gets past the blue welcome screen in miliseconds.

Odd stuff...

[Newblar]

you can always just get tweak ui or some registry tools to bypass all that

[imzjustplayin]

your HDD is probably dying, take off what you need and either RMA the drive or buy a new one. This is very common when an HDD is dying regardless of what the "smart" data says.