system starting to hang on bootup

Hi. I have noticed the last few times that I booted up my windows xp system that it's beginning to hang a little detecting my 2 hard disks. It used to say verifying dmi pool but I don't see that any more. the last text on the screen is IDE 0 master and IDE 0 slave as it hangs but does finally boot up after about 30 seconds. everything seems normal and my best guess is either the motherboard or the primary hard disk is ready to fail 100%. Anyone have any other ideas? thanks

 

I had this sort of problem, when the leads to a hard drive were loose.
You can try
Click, start, then, run, and type in CHKDSK /R, and click O.K.
You will see a window appear to say do you want to check when computer is restarted, click 'yes'
When it restarts it will check the disk for errors.
You can download a hard drive checker- Seagate's tool will check most hard drives- look at majorgeeks downloads, as I have to o out, and if you know which hard drives you have- you should find the tool there.
Have to go- good luck:wave

 

thanks. as long as it's booting up I'll let sleeping dogs lie. If it fails to boot I'll check the electrical connectors on the on disks. hadn't thought of that. worth a try if it won't boot. built the system myself so I was careful to seat all the connectors but after sitting for 2 years who knows. thanks again

 

I just ran a disk defrag program and now it boots up very quickly. hopefully that's all it needed.

 

It was the end of the mystery. I went to burn a music cd and my D: drive was missing when I looked in explorer. that's my dvd/cd burner. went into bios and it was there but I autoed it again and now it shows up in explorer and the computer boots up fast. I'll be watching it closely. either a bad connection, bad drive , or bad motherboard. I'll wait for 100% failure to swap out parts. just thought I'd pass this along.:-D

 

Reading the post it seems as if you are not doing regular maintenance, defrag and check disk should be scheduled "Must Do's"! I run defrag weekly left undone your system will slow down, Ck disk I run monthly it goes fairly quick about the time it takes to make a cup of tea.