10 minute boot time on Toshiba Laptop

Factual Questions
1

I have a relative’s laptop that is doing something weird. It’s a Toshiba about 2 years old, running Vista.

While booting it stays on the green squares bargraph for a normal amount of time, then HD activity ceases and it sits for literally 10 minutes. Then the HD starts up again and it continues on to the round windows icon and then to the user screen, runs pretty well from then on.

I’m good on computers but this one has me stumped. So far I’ve disabled IPv6, removed all unnecessary startup programs and services using MSCONFIG and SERVICES.MSC. Also uninstalled a bunch of toolbars and Blubster file-sharing type programs. I’ve run Spybot S&D and MalwareBytes, neither finds more than advertising cookies and that sort of thing. Defraggler is running right now but considering there is no HD activity during the boot pause, I don’t think that will help.

Anybody encountered anything like this?

2

Usually something like this is caused by the HDD, if it hits a bad sector it ‘hangs’ whilst it waits for a timeout before trying again, giving the impression that it isn’t doing anything. Have a look through the System section of Event Viewer and see if any disk errors are listed.

Otherwise, have you tried booting in safe mode, does the same thing happen?

3

My Toshiba laptop which is two years old and running Vista has been doing exactly the same thing lately.

4

The machine I am typing on now is several years old (at least five), a Toshiba laptop. It takes 10 minutes to boot, but not in the way described. It gets to my desktop quickly enough, but then spends an inordinate time spinning the hard drive. My brother warned me not to do anything on a booting computer until the hard drive stopped being read. All in all, it has taken over 10 minutes at times. No idea what’s going on. Someone once suggested to me that it has a relatively small memory (.5 gig IIRC) and spending a lot of time using a virtual disk It runs XP, BTW.

5

You can try running CHKDSK to check your hard drives.

CHKDSK will run the next time you reboot your computer. Depending on size and option it can take awhile to run.

Start -> Computer -> Select drive -> Right Click on Properties -> Tools -> Error Checking

What do you have running at start up

Go to Start -> Type “msconfig” (without quotes)

Then at the top you’ll see a startup

These will be all the things that are starting up automatically. Uncheck what you don’t want

If you have Vista you can also check this through Windows Defender

Do you have an anti-virus on your system. Spybot and MalwareBytes are more anti-malware. They are excellent tools but I would also add either AVG Free or Microsoft Security Essentials

6

Also have you tried booting into Safe Mode? If so, what is that like?

7

Doh, haven’t tried safe mode. It takes forever on crcdisk.sys. That will give me more to go on. One solution for that is to change the BIOS setting for SATA to Compatibility, but this has a very simple BIOS with no such option. I’m running HDD Regenerator on the drive now to see if it has bad sectors.