super long boot times (20+mins)

[Joseph Sinclair]

Have you tried booting up with no network plugged in and no USB devices plugged in? Windows often times out waiting for a slightly non-standard response from USB devices (5 minutes per device) during the boot sequence.  It might also be searching for a network resource (PXE boot, AD controller, etc...) leftover from somewhere.
Have you examined the "System" and "Application" logs in Event Viewer?  The startup messages there should help narrow down where the delay is occurring.
Is the RAID config via a hardware RAID controller, or via the motherboard?  Windows server doesn't play very well with the half-software RAID that's shipped on motherboards.
Have you made sure Windows has the drives set up correctly ("C:\Windows" on the IDE drive, "C:\Progra~1" and "C:\Program Files", which should be the same folder, on the IDE drive, the IDE drive as drive "C", and the IDE drive is not dynamic)?  Server 2003 often makes poor use of systems with both RAID and non-RAID drives, "required" "O/S components" are stored in Program Files, and sometimes accessed via "C:\Progra~1", and Windows still REALLY expects to be installed on drive "C".

eric© wrote:

> I just picked up a quad Xeon server today.  Verified working operation
> before I took it home.  It was running Windows Server 2003, and booted up
> quite quickly.  The guy cleared the SCSI RAID configs, and handed it over.
> I brought it home, and found the CD-ROM drive didn't want to release the
> tray.  Didn't have any floppies on hand, so I just tossed my boot hard
> drive
> in the machine and installed a copy of Windows Server 2003 to the IDE drive
> (yes, I know this is a Linux list).  Would have preferred Debian on there,
> but without a working CDROM, and no floppies......(I'm planning on stopping
> by Fry's this weekend to pick up a new CD-ROM drive for it)
> 
> Anyways, the only thing I changed on the machine after getting it was
> setting up the 6 SCSI drives as one big stripe, and made the IDE drive the
> primary boot drive.  Took over 3 hours to install Windows, and takes well
> over 20 mins just to boot now.  Doesn't appear to be an issue with the IDE
> drive, as the majority of the time, there is no disc access.  Once I log
> in,
> everything is quite snappy.  I also noticed that the file copies in setup
> went by really quick.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> eric
>