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General discussion

"Error on detected device" - Slow Windows Boot

May 27, 2006 8:29PM PDT

I have noticed recently that booting up my computer takes a considerably long time. The boot was hanging for 10 seconds on the first Windows XP loading screen (the black one). I also noticed that when it was hanging the drive activity indicator was constantly flashing unlike the variable flashing when booting up.

I had a look on the System Event Viewer in Control Panel and I noticed that it records about 20 of the following errors every time I boot -

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\D during a paging operation.

I think that this is referring to my drive 'D' which is not the drive which Windows is on but it is where my games is stored. It is a Samsung SATA drive.

I did a disk check on the drive and scanned for surface errors aswell. Unfortunately someone else in my house closed the results so I never knew what they were.

However the problem has not been solved. I look on the Microsoft knowledge base article for this error http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244780/en-us which told me to replace the drive the error appeared frequently, which is something I do not wish to do (the drive still has a warranty though). Just for reference I have three hard disks in my computer. One IDE Samsung drive for backup (drive C), one SATA Samsung drive for games (drive D) and one Seagate SATA drive for Windows (drive G).

Both the SATA drives are about 2 - 3 months old.

Discussion is locked

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Hope you have a backup.
May 28, 2006 12:03AM PDT

That's not a good message. I would run a drive fitness test on said drives and review that the person who installed the OS did install the latest motherboard and SATA drivers. XP will degrade from DMA to PIO when such errors happen which will make XP very slow.

The test program is from the drive maker.

Best of luck and hope you don't lose your drive data.

Bob

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2 Partitions
May 28, 2006 5:24AM PDT

I have found out that the HardDisk2/D is actually referring to Disk 2 in Computer Management not drive D. Disk 2 is my Windows and Documents drive which makes it even worse.

There is something that may be causing it. I installed Suse Linux a while back, tried it out then uninstalled it. However I deleted the partitions for Linux which was on my Windows and fixed the MBR but I did not resize the Windows partition. So on my Windows drive there is a 30 GB Windows Partition and the rest is unpartitioned. I wanted to resize the partition back to the full 80gb however I didn't at the time as all the partition resizing programs costed money. Is it worthwhile buying it now?

It seems quite unlikely as I uninstalled Linux a good 2 months ago.

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Odd.
May 28, 2006 7:08AM PDT

I noted 2 items and your reply didn't mention them. I can only guess that any help I offer is not understood or not read. Please ask for more detail if you wish.

-> As to resizing and such partitions. I've always found that to be a great idea but slightly dangerous. Partition Magic is always noted but not everyone feels it's worth it.

Best of luck and be safe.

Bob

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Disk Check
May 28, 2006 7:22AM PDT

Sorry forgot to mention, I did run the hard disk diagnostics using Seagate Diagnostics CD and all my drives passed the full disk scans with no errors but the slow boot is still persisting.

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The usuals I encounter for slow boots.
May 28, 2006 11:06AM PDT

1. XP set the DMA down a few notches. Flip all channels to PIO and back to DMA as noted at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

2. The OS was not installed on this hardware or latest motherboard drivers are not in use. Microsoft doesn't help here. Use the old fashioned ways.

-> I specifically have not asked about your startup items. I feel that owners usually have beat that up by the time they post.

Bob