Delay in booting Windows XP [into desktop]

[ComputerRepairTech]

HEHE I'm so used to letting D7 tell me if that is a problem or not I never check anymore so it didn't even occur to me to suggest it.



Not just in the BIOS, but you want to check Device Manager > IDE Controllers > Channel > Properties > Advanced and see if the hard drive is running in PIO mode.

Of course, if DMA is enabled in the BIOS but in Windows it's PIO mode, then you're back to probably having a bad drive. Windows tends to reduce DMA modes and even go all the way back to PIO mode automatically when it encounters drive/controller errors. The more errors over time, the further the DMA mode reduction until it gets all the way back to PIO mode. It does this to increase stability as the drive starts to fail. Usually you can reset the performance counters in the registry and put the drive back into DMA mode, but again this only usually occurs due to a failing HDD.

Off topic, it's worthy of note that the same can happen on the optical drives as well, and this is usually due to the drive reading scratched / damaged disks.

Hello again, was nick right? any luck on that dsupport issue? D7 automatically checks for pio issue? I use to use hdd tune to do that but one time it was thrown off by a sata in pio mode. This was a remote job so I didnt have access to bios but I can only assume his sata was in IDE mode being that it was on the ide controller. Anyway what I do is just a quick hdd tune read test. I rarely let it finish just a quick check to see if something is effecting the transfer rate.