Temporary black screen boot is driving me insane !

[Arthan]

I really hope you guys can help me with this because I am just this close to start hitting random objects with a sledgehammer.

For the last two weeks I have been having this very weird problem every single time I boot my computer. What happens is that just before the Windows XP loading screen shows up, I will get a black screen for about 45 seconds. At first I thought my computer was crashing but every time, after 45 seconds, Windows will resume as usual, everything boots fine and I get no problems whatsoever after. It just seems to hang there, not doing anything, and then it starts running again like nothing happen and the black Windows XP loading screen appears.

Given how this wasn't having much of an impact on my work, I decided to ignore this issue until I had some free time (today) to isolate the problem and fix it. Now, I have been trying for more than 10 hours to fix this without success. I've even gone through a format, and the black screen still shows up !!!

Please someone tell me you encountered this before and that you know of a super simple solution that will make my day.

 

[tigsounds]

Your pagefile may be encrypted. This slows things down quite a bit.
For more information, click HERE

You may have ATA drives on their own cable not pinned correctly as Master.

Edit HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction, find the string called Enable. If the string value is set to N, change it to Y.

Get BootVis HERE. Download and run the BootVis.msi program.
Close all other applications and once the program loads up, select File>New>Next Boot+Drivers Trace.
Your system will reboot in 15 secs. Once back from reboot, wait for certain files to get written to the drive—you’ll see a message stating that.
After this finishes, the program loads up again and displays a number of graphs.
Detailed help about each graph is available in the program, so I’ll not go into them.
These graphs represent the time required to load the different components mentioned as part of the boot process.
Hover your mouse over any item to see what it is.
"Boot complete" is the longer brown vertical line with a small box on top.

To optimize the system, you should run the above step 4-5 times. Then, select Trace>Optimize system from the menu and wait for another reboot. This one may take a slightly longer time than earlier ones. Defrag the system immediately after you’ve logged back in and subsequent bootups will see a much more improved boot time. Verify Task Scheduler Service is not disabled before running optimization.