Prevent ESCD refreshing?

Spartan117 · 07-14-2007, 08:59 AM

Hi again,

Annoying problem here, maybe someone can shed some light..

When I boot XP from regular IDE drive:
- Bios POST finishes
- XP goes directly into the graphical part of booting

All good. Then, when I boot the same image from an USB stick:
- Bios POST finishes
- Bios displays "verifying DMA pool, updating ESCD.. success" for 10 seconds
- XP bootprocess displays the black/white progress bar for 20-30 seconds
- XP goes into graphical part of booting

This happens whether i boot XP or a custom XPE image. If I understand correctly, the bios is updating its ESCD, followed by XP re-detecting and overwriting it during the "text mode" progress bar. Then, it all happens again on the next boot, which leads to horrible boot times.

The goal here is to stop either the bios or XP from screwing with the ESCD.

The mainboard is a MSI K8MM-V board with the latest bios (I've also tried some old ones). I can't find any options for disabling ESCD refresh/updating NVRAM/PnP options or anything seemingly relevant. This is my fifth mainboard in the quest for the perfect carputer, so I'd like to make it work

.. So, how do I force XP to stop overwriting the bios' ESCD settings? I've tried the fastdetect/nodetect/pcilock boot params, but no luck there.

.. And why the heck does this only happen when booting from USB, not IDE?

Spartan117 · 07-14-2007, 11:46 AM

Some additional info after more testing:

The ESCD refresh happens on both K8MM-V and K8MM3-V mainboards.

The K8M Neo-V however, does -not- refresh every time, and boot times are sweet. (Wish I could use it, but unfortunately the onboard sound on my card is busted..)

Spartan117 · 07-14-2007, 09:59 PM

Maybe a more generic question is in order:

- Why does some XP installations display the white-on-black progressbar for a little while during boot, while others skip right to the graphical part?

dupa2 · 07-14-2007, 10:34 PM

sometimes you just don't see that progress bar, it's too fast. ESCD update is rather hard coded into bios, and if there's no control for it, htere's not much you can do about.

For such reason I want to replace the bios with linuxbios, right now my system boots to gui (windowmaker) in about 30sec, and 10-12sec is just POST with that damn ESCD update, which actually does not do anything to kernel boot process.

All that linuxbios thing requires that your OS would have to be a linux. This won't work with windows.

Spartan117 · 07-15-2007, 09:10 AM

Thanks for the tip, but I need windows to be able to code my own stuff

I'd really like to know exactly why the the progress bar is sometimes slow, sometimes fast.. (Or in my case: always goes by in a flash, except when combining USB with K8MM*-boards)

dupa2 · 07-15-2007, 02:20 PM

is any flash drive connected?
If so, bios and bootloader may look for available drives, and usb timeout may make additional wait time. It happens on my via-c3 board when I connect usb flash card reader.

Spartan117 · 07-15-2007, 04:21 PM

All tests are done with only the USB stick (which i'm booting from) and a ps2-keyboard jacked into the motherboard, with everything else disabled.

This timeout you mention, does it manifest as the progress bar during boot? Do you have any documentation, or know how to work around it?

Spartan117 · 07-15-2007, 07:38 PM

I'm growing more desperate by the hour, so I made a little video to properly explain the problem

http://carr.no/boot.wmv