My PC is booting really slowly, please help

NathanP2007

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 17, 2007
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Okay so I built a PC years ago (Q9550, P5Q PRO Turbo, etc) for myself that I eventually sold to my brother. Recently I bought it back to use as a HTPC. I threw in a brand new Samsung Evo 850 and installed Windows 7 64bit on it. Everything has been great up until the past week or two. And in this time nothing has changed with the PC, nothing has been installed or uninstalled or anything.

What has been happening is when I turn the PC on, the Mobo splash screen stays on screen for ~45 seconds when in the past (and normally) it is more like 5-10 seconds. Then the Windows splash screen (with the pulsating window) displays for 30+ seconds (normally like ~5 seconds). Sometimes it even seems to go on forever until I turn off the PC manually.

Today I did that and when it restarted it asked if I wanted to run setup repair, I clicked yes (hoping this would fix the problem) but it didn't change anything. Also occasionally when I turn the PC off (using shutdown) it will display the shutting down for a while.

I honestly have no clue what the problem could be. The SSD otherwise seems healthy and fine. I posted this in mobo because I wonder if the mobo could be acting up due to age. Do you have a clue what could be going on?
 
I have experienced slow booting/nonPOSTing when a hard drive is about to die (even if the HDD is not a boot drive).

Try removing your HDDs from the equation and try again. (Unless the SSD is your only drive?)

If not, how about switching up the connections on those SATA ports?
 
break it down to the basics. board, chip, 1 stick of ram and single drive. even try without the drive to see if it post correctly. also check the cmos battery isn't dying should be 3v+.
 
I have experienced slow booting/nonPOSTing when a hard drive is about to die (even if the HDD is not a boot drive).

Try removing your HDDs from the equation and try again. (Unless the SSD is your only drive?)

If not, how about switching up the connections on those SATA ports?

break it down to the basics. board, chip, 1 stick of ram and single drive. even try without the drive to see if it post correctly. also check the cmos battery isn't dying should be 3v+.

try a new sata cable

I'll try all of these out. I'll Google how to find out how to check my CMOS battery voltage and such. I do know at least one SATA port on the mobo isn't right (DVD drive wouldn't show up in My Computer, switched SATA ports and it appeared).

Thanks for the help.
 
I do know at least one SATA port on the mobo isn't right (DVD drive wouldn't show up in My Computer, switched SATA ports and it appeared).

Apparently, some SATA ports on a 3rd party chip will refuse to work with ATAPI devices. I was looking over a Maximus Hero board when I was considering an LGA1151 upgrade and saw that.

Edit: What I mean to say is that the SATA port could either be problematic or it may just not accept DVD drives by design.
 
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--SOLVED--

I unplugged my DVD drive and it went back to booting normally (very fast). So I changed which SATA port my DVD drive is plugged into and now the problem is solved. This was on the top of my list because as I said above in an earlier comment; I have had an issue before where the SATA port my DVD drive was plugged into messed with the drive. In the BIOS under manf brand it would say like: "a ~ a ~ a ~ a ~" or something like that but 5x as long. Like it was glitchy or something. Not reading it correctly.

The only downside to all of this is now I am slightly bummed it isn't broken so I could buy a new mobo, CPU and RAM (was looking at the ASUS M5A99FX Pro R2.0 and the AMD FX-6300 Vishere 6-Core) haha. Saves me $250 but now I am still stuck with an old computer. Not that it should matter it is my HTPC so the hardware I got is good enough.
 
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