Solved 7 minute boot

My '2nd machine' runs Vista 32 bit Home Premium on a Pentium dual core processor. This is the machine described in my 'system specs'.

About 3 weeks ago I moved it and now it takes 6-7 minutes from power on to the screen that asks for a password. The fact that this started when I moved it may just be coincidental. In July, I was moving it around daily with no ill effects. Those moves were from a hotel to a house & back. The last move that coincides with when this problem started was from 1 room to another in the same house.

I am experiencing NO performance degradation/issues once the machine finally boots up. It runs as quickly as it has since I purchased it. Scans with Malwarebytes & Avira yield nothing. Both report the machine is 'clean'.

I have perhaps average computer literacy but its more in understanding software than hardware. I'm attaching 4 event logs that get generated at boot up. To demonstrate my knowledge or lack thereof, the event 102 log notes acpi.sys and I confirmed that nothing has changed with that file by comparing it bytewise with a backup found on an image I had created in July. That's pretty much all I've done as I need guidance in diagnosing this problem.

Any direction that anyone can provide will be appreciated. Thank-you!

P.S. I thought about restoring an image taken before I moved the machine. The problem is that during the boot up cycle, the F12 function doesn't appear to work. Ironically, the screen that displays the F12 boot options prompt is up for 4 or 5 minutes rather than the normal second or 2. Anyway, to restore an image, I'd want to boot from Acronis' boot disk rather than the computers boot drive and the new boot cycle won't let me do that.

Hi,

1 Question: -

Have you changed any settings in the BIOS? If so, undo those changes or reset your BIOS if you cannot remember what you changed. OK?

No, no changes in the BIOS that I did manually. And since this machine is moving from primary to backup, I haven't added any software to it that might have adjusted anything much less the BIOS. But thank-you for the suggestion!!

You may want to make a full anti virus scan
Download and make a full scan with malwarebytes and check out this tutorial
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/81176-speed-up-performance-vista.html
A clean boot for testing would help, too.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

I'm fairly confident this isn't a virus or some other malware. Avira's full scan is pretty comprehensive and it found nothing. Plus I'm not experiencing any symptoms that suggest virus. The computer shows no difference in performance other than it takes much longer to boot up.

I'll give the clean boot a go and see what happens. And I'll try some of the stuff on the speedup list. A lot of that I have in place already...no aero or thumbnails or sidebar, I clear the temp file and defrag both disk & registry religiously, high performance option is in effect, I never hibernate or sleep, system restore is OFF...disk imaging has proven more reliable for me, etc. But 43 items...that's going to take a few days to go through!

Have you tried standard boot logging?
The system may be timing out waiting for a series of drivers that are not on the machine.
Or you may see something anomalous.

The ntbootlog.txt has the same info if you see if you boot the machine with command line interface. Loading each driver etc..

http://www.watchingthenet.com/how-to-enable-boot-logging-for-fixing-startup-problems-in-windows.html

edit: also, although it's more common for hardware to work cold, then lock up when it heats up, I'm told sometimes it happens the other way around. It doesn't start working until it heats up.

Esp. if you've been moving the box around it may not hurt to open it up and reseat any cards in the machine. But I'd do the boot log first.

No I have not but I will provided I can get F8 to work properly during the boot sequence. The boot sequence shows that F8/F12 screen for about 5 minutes rather than a split second. And I know pressing F12 repeatedly doesn't work so I'm a bit concerned F8 may not either. But I'll give it a go.

Thanks for guiding me to this. I had no idea boot logging existed. My suspicion based on what I could get from the event logs was that some driver was out of whack. Of course I could be misinterpreting what they're saying given my lack of experience here. But if that suspicion is born out, this will tell me which driver I need to take care of.

So I have two tasks ahead of me later tonight. Try boot logging & clean booting and see if I can get some better idea where the problem lies from the results.

Thanks, Richc46 & MilesAhead!

Edit: Make that 3 tasks. I just noticed the 'similar threads' at the bottom. Apparently I am not alone. My search didn't turn up anything relevant but my search didn't turn up the threads now being shown to me.

If clean boot does not show anything, but I think it will, Miles solution should do the trick.

Well, I couldn't get into safe mode. I literally stood there for 7 minutes pressing the friggin' F12 key (its F12 on my system, not F8). No go.

Something I didn't mention because it seemed irrelevant. Shows you what I know. I have a pair of cheap Dell speakers on the machine. When I moved the machine, I took them off & used the monitor's speakers. I also plugged the keyboard & mouse into a USB hub hanging off the front of the machine. In the 'old' setup, they plugged directly into ports in the back. I did this because the new space the machine sits in is limited (speakers) and quite tight (thus the USB hub hanging off the front of the machine). Because of my hunch this problem was driver related, I decided to restore the Dell speakers & plug the keyboard/mouse directly into the machine's USB ports. The monitor speakers after all now used different drivers + the drivers for the Dell speakers had no device to drive. Not sure if that's valid but its what I was thinking. Voila! It now boots fine. So the issue is resolved.

And since I disabled System Restore while trying to figure this thing out, it actually boots noticeably faster than it used to.

So thanks to you guys for responding. I did learn a few things such as the boot logging feature and the concept of clean booting.

Glad you got it going. Thought it might have something to do with moving the machine.

btw if it boots a lot faster with system restore disabled then task scheduler was probably set to create a restore point on every boot. You can create restore points when you feel like it easily using the tutorial script:

System Restore Point - Create - Windows 7 Forums

If you enable system protection then you'll have to figure out how to get rid of the restore point creation on every boot. I never use Task Scheduler except to turn off tasks MS put in there. So I'm not the person to ask.

If you don't want to run with System Restore then it might still be a good idea to back up your registry with ERUNT

I make an image of the 'C' (system) drive weekly. Is there additional benefit to backing up the registry independent of that?

If you have a complete image, you are ok.
You may want to back up registry, just in case you know you have a registry problem and dont want to change everything, just to fix the registry.

redbird14 said:

I make an image of the 'C' (system) drive weekly. Is there additional benefit to backing up the registry independent of that?

Click to expand...

I think so. I boot up every day. For me it makes sense to use AutoBack.exe as described in the ERUNT readme. I have a shortcut in StartUp folder with this Target:
"C:\Program Files\ERUNT\AUTOBACK.EXE" %SystemRoot%\ERDNT\#Date# sysreg curuser otherusers /days:7

It makes a revolving backup 7 days long. Once you fill the week it deletes the oldest day. Disk space used is stabalized since the oldest goes off when the newest comes on.

Restoring just restores registry settings. So if you did a reg cleaner that hosed things, or your custom shell theme went bonkers, you can use ERDNT restore to fix it without overwriting other files. With restore point or image restore you can lose apps you installed in the interval.

It's just one more layer that costs nothing but some time setting up. Also if you can read the HD but not boot because of a hosed registry sometimes you can fix it by using a WinPE type boot disc and running ERDNT off the hd. The readme is a bit dense and complex so you might want to rewrite the salient bits to a file you can understand when you're pulling your hair out. That's probably the area that requires improvement rather than the code.

I've been using ERUNT since NT 4.
Any time it didn't work it's because I misunderstood something in the readme.

I have only one suggestion. Open it up and make sure
everything inside is tight. Some times thing come lose.
You say you have been moving it around.

Jimmy