Freeze during boot up

[Nyoko]

I'm having a problem where in between POST and the Windows logo I get like a one to two minute freeze where all I see is the motherboard screen on a fastboot. I just had to get a new harddrive so I had to reload my OS. When first loaded it was doing just fine, then everything got updated and suddenly its doing this. Any suggestions? OS is XP Pro SP3. Thanks

[Spirit]

Hi Nyoko;

hmm... since you've just made a significant hardware change, I would try undoing it to see if you still get the pause. If the old hd is fubard, try without any hd to see if you still get the pause.

Remember you may need to change a pin setting on the hd, or possibly a bios setting. With EIDE you had the business with slave/master/cable select ... not sure on the details of Sata.

You mention it was fine with the initial install ... with my last copy of Xp, I had to go through a number of reboots before mine was fully patched. Do you remember if a specific patch caused the problem?

I hope this helps a little;

Rakku

[Steelclaw]

Go in to the BIOS settings and turn off the splash image. That should expose the diagnostic text that is displayed during the POST. Then you can get a better idea of what the machine is doing during the "hang".

A long POST is usually the result of the BIOS looking for hardware that isn't there. Enabling PXE boot (network boot) can also suck up time as the machine looks for a bootp server on the network that probably doesn't exist.