Long Boot Time 10min
 

Here is the situation:

My dad calls me up and tells me that his computer is not working after a brown out occurred. Well I check it out and it is taking forever to boot up. It pauses just after it flashes the video card information but before it checks the ram or the ide connections. After about 10 min waiting there it boots fine and will go into windows xp where everything appears to be normal. I was wondering what could the cause of this problem be?


Specs:

Processor: AMD XP 2600
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7N400-L1
Video Card: Geforce FX 5200
Sound: Soundblaster Live
OS: Windows XP

Any input would be truly appreciated



Thanks for all the help but I was able to fix the problem. Basicly I just removed all the components and added them one at a time until there was no more problem. Everything seems to be working fine now. Once again I just want to thank everyone who took the time to help out.

Perhaps something funky happened to the vid card, I'm going to suggest that A) he try another video card and see if the error keeps happening or B) run a full diagnostic on the card if A is not possible.

I will have to give that a try, but I thought the display would be messed up if the video card was bad.

It actually might be the RAM.

On one of my computers if I don't run it in quick boot it goes through each MB of RAM about 1 MB every second. Its rediculously slow but if I run it under quick boot its much much faster. Try running it in quick boot. If its the RAM that should speed up greatly

I would check RAM also.. I would also open the case up and do a hard reste on the bios (jumper or take the battery out)

yup. Ram is my guess as well. This is why UPS's are such a good idea ;)

Why would a UPS be a good idea in this situation?

Because brownouts would be regulated by the UPS. The computer wouldn't get bad power input and thus the effects of said don't apply.

The same shit happened to me last year, I found out it was the memory, good ol new egg happily and surprisingly RMA'd my stick and gave me a brand new one. Viva la New Eggo!

I know that it is not the ram becuase I tried a simm from another computer and it had the exact same problems. Could it be a conflict with another pci card that was somehow damaged? I was going to try and take everything out except the bare essentials and see what happenes.

It might be a bitch to do but a component by component check might be in order. Also, is it beeping at all during the Bios boot, a specific beep can signal the problem some times.

The only beep is when it first turns on it beeps once. I believe this is supposed to signal that everything is working fine.

Do all of the connected IDE devices list ok in the bios. Have you tried going in there and checking your settings and re saving them. Sometimes power outages reset alot of settings in the bios.

go into bios and make sure that quick boot or fast boot is turned onso it don't have to take the time to count the ram, it probably just reset the bios and not its at defaults which nost do a full ram count at boot

I would try reinstalling all the major component drivers, like the chipset drivers and the videocard drivers. I'd also unplug any peripherals such as printers, etc, and see if that makes a difference. If a printer or other peripheral is fried, XP may be trying to reinstall or something on each boot. The point is to replace/update what you can, and isolate the problem, if it's hardware related

A modem once did this to me -- a physical removal caused the machine to perform as normal again (and I tossed the modem)

Thanks for all the help but I was able to fix the problem. Basicly I just removed all the components and added them one at a time until there was no more problem. Everything seems to be working fine now. Once again I just want to thank everyone who took the time to help out.