Windows 7 boot time more than 20 minutes for fresh installation

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ethu

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Aug 7, 2009
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Any ideas on what could be causing the problem will be highly appreciated as I am totally lost now having tried all the below mentioned tasks.

The machine configuration is as follows.

Motherboard - ASUS P5K PREMIUM/WIFI-AP LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel
Memory - 8 GB (Two kits of Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model PDC24G6400LLK)
HDD - 1x250 GB SATA (OS installed on this), 1x500 GB IDE, 1x250 GB IDE
OS - Windows 7 64 bit RC

BIOS - SATA configured as IDE, JMicron configured as IDE and latest BIOS installed / flashed.

I thought it was problem with Windows 7 installation and re-installed it after having deleted / recreated partition and formattated the 250 GB SATA HDD on which OS is installed.

I also performed the following tests to see if there were any problems.

a) Check the disk for errors using the Disk Management/Tools (which is chkdsk I guess) including check and recover bad sectors for the OS disk (on restart of machine) and also the 500 GB IDE data disk (no bad sectors found). The third 250 GB IDE disk is not having any data as of now. It is freshly formatted too.
b) Run Windows 7 memory diagnostic (no errors found).
c) As Windows 7 memory diagnostic checks only 4 GB of memory (as per Microsoft article), also ran three copies of Memtest (free edition) simultaneously giving each one of them 2 GB for testing (no errors found after more than 100% coverage for each of three Memtests).

I am totally lost as to what is it that takes Windows 7 RC 64 bit more than 20 minutes to load. Even if I use Safe mode (the verbose mode) to show the loading of drivers, it takes 10 minutes of showing "Starting Windows" with blank screen, another 5 minutes of "Starting Windows" with the Windows logo around and only after that it starts loading the drivers (it stops for a quite long time after loading CLASSPNP.SYS again).

Earlier, it was loading quickly. The only change that I can remember from then to now is that I have added the two IDE disks.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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Jun 20, 2006
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Another way to do the above is go into "Device Manager", find the SATA controllers, right-click and remove the one your hard drive is on.

REBOOT.

If this doesn't work, get a progrem like "HDTUNE" or "HDTACH" and benchmark your Windows' hard drive and see if the numbers are close. Mainly you care about average read speed. A new 3.5" drive should max out at 100MB/second+ and drop to about 50MB/second.
 
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ethu

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Aug 7, 2009
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I used HDTach 3.0 (with Windows XP SP3 compatibility) and it gives results at 51.3 MB/second average read speed (between 50 and 52 MB/sec consistently on subsequent runs) for the Western Digital 250 GB SATA drive on which OS is installed.

 
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ethu

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Aug 7, 2009
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I tried disabling the JMicron Controller on motherboard. This effectively removes the IDE drives as they are no longer available.

Windows 7 boots normally within one minute.

What could be the reason for IDE drives or JMicron controller for Windows 7 to take 20+ minutes to boot.
 
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ethu

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Aug 7, 2009
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I opened up the machine and disabled one of the IDE drives. Things were working fine after that.

The problem is that even SpinRite bootable CD does not detect this IDE drive.
 
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