Thread: Decreasing boot times

I've got a simliar question. My computer boots windows in about 15 seconds because I stripped it down and set winamp as the shell, but it spends 40 (!!!!!) seconds sitting at the main bios startup screen. It scans the memory, detects the hard drive, then sits there for 40 seconds (I clocked it)! Any ideas on how to speed this up? I disabled the floppy controller and the secondary ide channel and fiddled around in bios and such, but can't speed the damn thing up.

?


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http://mp3box.2y.net

Oh yea, I forgot to answer your question Loading winamp as the shell increases boot time by 10 seconds or so, and you can't run more than one program.

I use DR-DOS which has MPXPlay running in 12 seconds from boot, but at one time my bios would stick for almost a minute waiting for nothing as well.

The problem, which I still can't explain, is because I had two HDDs; the first was the primary master and the second was a secondary slave. There was no CDROM. When I moved the secondary slave to primary slave, it solved the problem. I don't know if you have a similar setup, but if you have multiple drives, I'd try moving the second one around. It doesn't hurt to try.

After hours of trial and error, this was the only way, however inane, that I could solve the problem that you are experiencing.

Hope this helps.

Gutter
http://impee3.hypermart.net

Try setting your bios to not detect the HD, put in the settings manually.
That will usually kill some time on the boot.
Also set the boot options to C only, instead of a:, cdrom, harddrive (or whatever you have set)

You should also have an option to do a "quick-boot" which should speed things up. You might also check to see if it's doing a complete memory check turn it off.

-kate


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"The problem, which I still can't explain, is because I had two HDDs; the first was the primary master and the second was a secondary slave. There was no CDROM. When I moved the secondary slave to primary slave, it solved the problem. I don't know if you have a similar setup, but if you have multiple drives, I'd try moving the second one around. It doesn't hurt to try."

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I had that problem with my system here, only the BIOS would fail to recognize the primary master HD at all after sitting there for a minute. Reboot, and the thing worked fine. Then I redid the drive order (to get some slack in the cables) when I installed another fan in the case and all of a sudden the thing worked fine. I don't remember exactly what I did, but if anyone is interested, I could make a note of the settings next time I boot.

"Is it worth it to change your shell command to boot straight into winamp instead of explorer? And if that is done can you load two programs? like

shell=c:\program\blah\winamp.exe;c:\program\girder \girder3.exe"

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Could you write a program to launch both winamp and girder and make THAT your shell?

Like just a batch file that launched both programs? I could try that.

very simple...just open up notepad and write

@echo
c:\whateverdir\someprogram.exe
c:\anotherprogram.exe

then save it as a .bat file. Then change your shell to that batch file.