TheProf

Hello,

I hope everyone is well.

Normally I am able to resolve most issues that come my way in I.T. -- heck my job relates directly to it!

But I've got an 8 month old Asus laptop that is stumping me. Essentially it takes a HECK of a long time to boot. How long? It seems to just freeze and wait for minutes.

What is weird is that the hard drive light is CLEARLY not lit, so it's not grinding or accessing software or anything. It's just dead.

Here's the situation:
Power up machine.
BIOS POST successful.
Right after that we get the first freeze. There is a point in a laptop boot-up sequence after POST where the screen is entirely blank and the LCD is not active. It's before the Windows logo shows up or the white windows booting bar across the bottom is seen. It just sits there quietly doing who know what.

After a minute or so you will see the LCD get dark (it's hard to explain -- watch your machine boot and you'll know what I mean) and then the Windows logo shows up with the little blue progress bar. After that screen goes away it then goes blank for another minute or two with no hard drive activity, then the User login screen kicks in where you select your user and enter your password.

This occurs whether I am booting normally or safe mode. This does not occur if I am coming out of hibernation.

Machine is a Core 2 Duo, 1.6 Ghz, 1 GB RAM.
AVG anti-virus reports a clean bill of health.
Ewido reports a clean bill of health.
I have removed almost everything from the startup list (only maybe 6 components are listed).

The delay is unreal...maybe 6 minutes waiting.

Any thoughts?

Thank you.

Lasereth

I would be reformatting that SOB.

TheProf

I have thought about that

I'd rather not though - it's a tablet so there's more drivers/software and I've done a lot of tweaking to get it to where it is now.

Are there other options before that one?

TheVirus

Just so you know, they make programs that will take the drivers off of it, and store it on a jump drive, or cd. But, the problem could be in the drivers so if you can get to them easy, just find them again. :P


Edit: I'm sure there are other options, have you ran any hard drive scan programs?

TheProf

So there's really no other option except to format? I'm working and studying full time so it's a really bad time for something like this.

I have run a diagnostic on the drive and it reports everything is fine. S.M.A.R.T. data shows all conditions are within normal operations and health is good.

TheVirus

I wouldn't reformat yet, you might be able to find another way to fix it, hell, that might not even be the problem.


http://www.majorgeeks.com/

They have a support forum, you might wana try posting there.

TheProf

Thanks for that link -- I may try that next.

One last thought -- anyone here familiar with Hijack this? Would that prove useful or does it have a different purpose? Anyone used it?

Thank you

Redjake

You could give it a shot, but all it does is compare a base load of your OS to your own system and shows you the differences in software. It almost always reveals any spyware, adware, etc. that is on your machine.

However, it will also show all sorts of perfectly legit items as well - so you have to sift through each item and decide if it is spyware/adware and hope you are right. Once it's removed, it's very much removed. You can create a backup just in case you are wrong, though.

In your situation, I would backup your shit and reformat. Find the drivers you need before you do so, but it's the easiest solution in my opinion - especially when your problem is as obscure as your's. That would drive me insane. Hunt around for a little while longer, then I'd get to reformatting

The only time I've had a problem like this was when the IDE bus went bad in my old motherboard. It caused massive delays like this. I eventually used an IDE-to-SATA converter and hooked up my hard drive into the SATA bus on the motherboard - didn't even have to reformat. Fixed the issue immediately.

That'll be hard to do on a laptop though

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Off the record, on the q.t., and very hush-hush.

Lasereth

Yeah the reason everyone reformats so often is because a complete Windows XP reinstall takes around 30 minutes. 45 if your PC sucks. I'm sure you've spent longer than 45 minutes trying to fix the issue...back up your files, make a list of programs you use a lot, and get to it!! At work if we can't fix a PC in the first 10 minutes (no joke) we simply reimage it using Norton Ghost. Back up their favorites, documents, and desktop...then reimage. No reason in trying to turn chicken shit into chicken salad when chicken salad takes 10 minutes to make.

spindles

Does the machine have a hidden 'reformat' partition? If so, just click F9 when the ASUS logo displays - this will recreate your C drive back to factory defaults - windows installed in about 20 minutes on my ASUS laptop.

This will include all the drivers, so you should be good to go.

Obviously you want to backup everything first

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who hid my keyboard's PANIC button?

Vitter

System restore.
If you don't have any restore points that solve the issue, I'd have to go with reformatting it. If you reformat, you can use a program called 'Drivermax' to save the drivers - makes the process a lot less painful.

And another thing: The hard disk may be damaged; I know you said that the thing wasn't even being read, but if you could, please humor me and try out a program called spinrite on your computer; It's not free though, and it's up to you where you get it. If you don't want to do that there is always Windows chkdsk (start>run>"chkdsk /r").