Spanned volumes, slow boot with Win XP

[DWhitley]

I've just created a spanned volume from dynamic disks under Windows XP. It consists of four separate volumes. I had a trojan problem around the same time (SHeur2.LRX and maybe Bagel), now removed. All the usual maintenance has been performed.

On boot up, Windows XP is hanging for a while after the 'Welcome' screen. When it finally completes, everything works well. I don't know whether the delay is caused by damage from the trojans or a side effect from the dynamic disks. If it's just the dynamic disks, I can live with it for a while.

Anyone know whether dynamic disks and spanned volumes can delay Windows startup on old computers please (Athlon XP 2200+)?

[pauldarkside]

Personally, I'd not trust a repair job, I'd do a clean install and start from scratch.

[DWhitley]

That would certainly be ideal. I'm planning another PC - I'll do a clean install when the new one is up and running and use the Athlon as an HTPC.

[watercooled]

I'm not sure if it's related but I recently tried switching to AHCI under Windows 7 which added about 10s or something to boot time - the Windows logo usually only shows for a few seconds but instead it was getting there, the HDD was idling for a while then it would start reading again and it would load. Needless to say I switched back to Native IDE since AHCI was offering no apparent performance increases and I only did it in ther first place so I could hot-swap my eSATA dock which didn't seem to work afterwards (there was the option to try to hot swap my system drive though ) but by that time I couldn't be bothered messing about any more with it. Maybe it would have worked better if the system was originally installed with the HDD in AHCI mode or maybe it's a bad default driver for the SB700?

[defgn]

I'm not sure if it's related but I recently tried switching to AHCI under Windows 7 which added about 10s or something to boot time - the Windows logo usually only shows for a few seconds but instead it was getting there, the HDD was idling for a while then it would start reading again and it would load. Needless to say I switched back to Native IDE since AHCI was offering no apparent performance increases and I only did it in ther first place so I could hot-swap my eSATA dock which didn't seem to work afterwards (there was the option to try to hot swap my system drive though ) but by that time I couldn't be bothered messing about any more with it. Maybe it would have worked better if the system was originally installed with the HDD in AHCI mode or maybe it's a bad default driver for the SB700?

If it's not broke don't fix it?

[watercooled]

I was trying to get hot-swapping working for me eSATA dock which isn't supported under IDE mode.

[DWhitley]

My hard disks are PATA, anyway.

[DWhitley]

Finally tracked the problem down to a dodgy SAPI 5 speech recognition service. Don't recall installing it and another computer running Win XP Pro SP3 and similar software didn't have either the service or the file spcplui32.dll in the sys32 folder.

Disabled the service, deleted the file, backed up the registry, removed all references to spcplui32.

Many thanks for your help.

[watercooled]

Glad you got it sorted!