Long startup after reinstalling and repairing XP Home.

The main board's screen, which used to be displayed for about 2 seconds on startup, is now displayed for a little over 2 minutes.

The next thing I am presented with is the screen which prompts me to select which OS to load (I have only one, XP Home.)

After that the screen goes blank (black) for another two minutes before displaying the Windows loading screen.

What might have caused this behaviour and what can I do to reset it to normal?

 

Yes DomLuc, I am quite aware of those differences.

I first did a clean reinstallation, starting with a full formatting of the hard drive.

After I had downloaded and installed all the available updates again I then reloaded my applications.

Somewhere along the way something went awry and I noticed one or two odd things - I don't remember exactly what.

I tried running sfc /scannow but couldn't get it to work. I found that the source path for the i386 files wasn't present in the registry, i.e. no entry for "Source Path".

I then did a repair installation and that reinstated the correct path to the C drive.

sfc /scannow was run but that didn't clear things up.

A restoration to a few days ago hasn't helped either.

I am beginning to resign myself to another fresh resinstallation

By the way, I transplanted the hard drive from my older PC to this one for use as storage.
I can't see any problem with using that to store the files I want to keep, do you?

 

Yes, the old drive is installed as a second hard drive. The system allocated it a separate drive letter when I told the BIOS about it.

Ok, I shall transfer a few files, take a few deep breaths and start again.

Thank you.

 

That 2nd hard drive. Did it have an OS installed on it at one time?

 

Yes it did. However before the BIOS on this machine would accept the new drive it had to be re-formatted.

 

I started again.

Saved some files to c.d., reformatted the drive, reinstalled, downloaded all the updates and all is well.

I must try to cultivate the habit of creating restore points more frequently.

Thank you for your interest.