I started to have this problem a week ago. My computer (AMD2600 with XP SP2) booted up very slowly, sometimes took 10 minutes, as if it was stuck somewhere, other times it simply failed to boot up and restarted by itself, but once it did boot up successfully, it worked fine. I restored the system with Ghost to make sure it wasn’t caused by virus or spyware, but the problem persisted. I checked my Western Digital WD1200JB hard drive with the error-checking tool in XP, but no error was found. Then I downloaded the Western Digital Diagnostic tool and ran a quick test. The test failed within a few seconds, saying that it “failed to read tested elements”. Does this mean the hard drive failed and caused the slow boot-up? Thanks in advance for any help.
I always find the tests on http://www.pcpitstop.com/ very helpful. They told me that my Laptop HD & my processor was running slower than they should be - Sadly it's a Tiny with a 3 year guarantee :|
