Win98 - long pause in start up

[whist]

There is a two minute pause in my start up sequence (boot up). By watching "step by step" I found the pause starts right after the mouse driver loads. Bootlog shows everything normal. Once the boot up completes everything seems to run normal. During the pause my hard drive and cd drive lights flash in a recurring pattern 4 or 5 times. Acts like maybe Windows is hunting for something. Selective shut down using "msconfig" didn't help although booting to "safe mode" does not pause. A little background. I had lost a hard drive, replaced it and since I had lost a lot of data, decided to wipe all hard drives clean with "fdisk" and install 98 on a clean system. The pause appeared on the very first, full boot after 98 was loaded an has been there ever since. No conflicts in "device manager".
Abit BH7, Celeron 700, 3 SCSI HD's, 1 SCSI CDR/W. 1 IDE HD, and a floppy. Also an external 1 Gb JAZZ Drive but didn't add it until I had Windows running. Printer and Scanner not installed yet. At first I thought maybe it actually takes that long with that many SCSI devices but they why the repeated scans of the hard drives? What appear to be scans are about 20 seconds or more apart. If I can supply any further information just let me know. -- whist

[Byte 2.0]

Any chance you have a NIC in the PC?

A NIC in a PC can really add to the Boot time like that.
I ask about a nic because you list no communication devices or sound cards.

[whist]

No network cards, WiseCom, 56K, external modem on COM2, DFI AGP-7410 video card (Yamaha drivers), Jazz Jet PCI SCSI card (Adaptec drivers) and a Hauppauge Video Capture card. All are installed per "Device Manager" with no problems. The video capture card doesn't have anything attached to it right now.

[GaryRouth]

What device is loading in after the mouse?

Anything interesting in Bootlog.txt?

Over the course of a few years, maybe you updated the SCSI drivers? (and it's time to update them again? - since with the reinstall you have circa 98?)

Anything interesting in Device Manager under the Performance tab?

. . . Gary

[whist]

After the mouse loads the screen goes black with a flashing cursor in the upper left corner which just sits there for about two minutes until the drives whir into activity and Windows finishes booting up. The next screen I see is the desktop. I've gone through bootlog.txt and every thing completes successfully except for one or two things which I looked up on the Web and found that it was normal. The SCSI drivers are the latest I could find, most are mid 2002 dated. Device Manager, Performance Tab says 448 Mb RAM and at this moment Resources 66% free. File System and Virtual Memory are 32 bit and no Disk Compression.

[whist]

Bootlog.txt show two failures, "ndis2sup.vxd" and "SDVXD" both of which are probably normal per "http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q127970".

[mike breck]

Download the free Boot Log Analyzer program from

http://www.vision4.dial.pipex.com/

This will analyze the log file and show the duration of each event that occured when Windows loaded.

Look for the event which is taking an unusually long time to complete and which hardware device or software program it's identified with.

If you can identify the culprit, then try removing and reinstalling the device. If that doesn't work then see if you can get an updated driver or patch.

HTH

[whist]

What a nifty little program the Bootlog Analyzer is. Definately a keeper.

Ok, there was one file which loaded up that stuck out like a sore thumb It's "asc.mpd", it takes around 90 seconds to do it's thing while most all of the others take a second or less. I did find a newer version (2.37B) which I downloaded and installed. Reboot = same ole story. "asc.mpd" is a Windows, SCSI, host adapter, mini-port driver. The new version shaved 3 seconds off the time shown on a previous run. Now it's just a few seconds short of being a minute and a half. So apparently this is more or less normal. What do you think? -- whist

[GaryRouth]

We don't have any PCs with SCSI devices here at the moment - though everything on the mainframes is SCSI, but that 90 seconds for loading asc.mpd sure sounds like the difference between a quick 30 second boot and a lengthy one. Most of our Win98 machines without any network going on boot in about 30 seconds. If DHCP is working on network addresses, that adds about 90 seconds. Sounds like the SCSI driver is adding your 90 seconds.

Check out this page, which lists the ASC.MPD file as a Win95/98 miniport driver for your Jaz Jet PCI Ultra card:
http://www.iomega.com/support/documents/60016.html

Perhaps it's just a matter of finding one that gets along with your card a little faster.
. . . Gary

[hmm.. you mentioned you were using Adaptec drivers - but I'm wondering if the Jet uses an Advansys adapter?]

[plumerjr]

Is there any thing like the boot analyzer for shut down? I've also had the same pause on start up, I've recently installed a NIC card so that may explain that, would it also do it on shutdown?

[whist]

Gary - You are absolutely right about the drivers being AdvanSys. Guess I had a wire crossed somewhere?? I got into Iomega's chat with one of their Tech's and he seemed to think that it's normal for that driver (asc.mpd) to take that long to load up. He more or less indicated that if there was something wrong with it, one or more of the SCSI drives wouldn't work properly. So, since everything works once Windows gets booted up, I guess I'll just put up with it for now.

By the way, if anyone has problems with an Iomega product that live chat feature they have on their web site under "support" works pretty good. You have to use Internet Explorer though. I couldn't get in with Netscape 7.0. It won't handle the Java Script correctly.

plumerjr - I've never seen anything on something similiar to Bootlog Analyzer for monitoring "shut down" but that doesn't mean there isn't any. Maybe someone else will come up with something.

whist

[whist]

Final note on the above problem for those who may have this problem now or in the future. I've gotten the total boot time down to just 5 to 10 seconds over 2 minutes from "power on" to "hourglass disappear". Unfortunately I did two things during one fix it attempt and I don't know which one actually helped the most. First off I went into Device Manager and removed all of the SCSI Drives and then I rebooted to a DOS prompt. Then from DOS I added the necessary lines in Config.sys and Autoexec.bat to load up the drivers so everything would work from a clean DOS prompt. Finaly I rebooted again and let it go in into Windows. I noticed it didn't take as long as before so I did another reboot just to time it and came up with the just over two minute total time. I don't know whether removing the drives in Device Manager so that Windows could redetect them or adding the lines to Config.sys and Autoexec.bat, did the trick. Maybe it was a combination of both.