Gray Progress Bar before XP boot screen

By ThunderRiver
in Microsoft (Windows)

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ThunderRiver

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From time to time, when I upgrade Windows XP to SP2, I see a gray progress bar (like the one you see in Windows 2000), right before the actual Windows XP black boot screen.

I figured that maybe that's because the hard disk is heavily fragmented, so I used Diskeeper 8 to defrag the hard disk. After defragment, the gray progress bar now loads faster, but is still present before the actual XP boot screen.

Does anyone know how to get rid of the gray progress bar?

Grand Master

Shetland

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It was always there, even when XP first was released. I remember seeing it on slower machines. But now I too am seeing it since I upgraded to SP2. I wonder if more things are loading now than before.

yeah i got it on sp1 and before that, so its always been therre

Grand Master

Hypoxiaicon

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Taken from Adrian Rojak

This BIOS feature is a misnomer since it doesn't actually control the bus mastering ability of the onboard IDE controller. It is actually a toggle for the built-in driver that allows the onboard IDE controller to perform DMA (Direct Memory Access) transfers.

When this BIOS feature is enabled, the BIOS loads up the 16-bit busmastering driver for the onboard IDE controller. This allows the IDE controller to transfer data via DMA, resulting in greatly improved transfer rates and lower CPU utilization in real mode DOS and during the loading of other operating systems.

When this BIOS feature is disabled, the BIOS will not load up the 16-bit busmastering driver for the onboard IDE controller. The IDE controller will then transfer data via PIO.

Therefore, it is recommended that you enable IDE Bus Master Support. This greatly improves the IDE transfer rate and reduces the CPU utilization during the booting process or when you are using real mode DOS. Users of DOS-based disk utilities like Norton Ghost can expect to benefit a lot from this feature.

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nevermind that, just try it... I reon its just that 16-bit driver loading up :)

Grand Master

Hypoxiaicon

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youll see it no matter what some times itll be so fast you wont notice it but itll be there so you can get into safe mode and whatnot i see it some times big deal its going to be there

Not in my case. If its disabled or enabled it goes for me. (cant remember which)

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Jaded

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dont worry about this it does not affect anything else besides what you see during the boot up for those couple seconds. as for why it happens when you update to sp2, who knows, but it seems to happen more often on slower machines like >=700Mhz or with computers with low ram >=256. so i guess you could try disableing some boot procs and see if that clears enough memory for your pretty boot sceen

Grand Master

John Veteran

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First of all, XP is fully 32 bit; there is NO 16 bit driver loading.

Now that that's out of the way, I assume it's NTLDR (the file in the root of your system partition) loading ntoskrnl.exe (the Windows kernel) or possibly the registry, I don't know :unsure:

BTW, Windows 2000 has this too ;)

Grand Master

John Veteran

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u could goto system properties>advanced>startup and recovery options and lower the time to display operating systems or recovery options.... then c if u still c it... default is 30...

i dont c it nemore i just saw it on my laptop...

No, that's not it. When Windows fails to boot, the next time you boot it will ask you if you want to boot into safe mode. After 30 seconds, it goes with the default choice. What you're changing there is the amount of time it waits before choosing in this situation.

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~eskimo-nz

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Yeah i've had this problem since SP2. I havent been able to get rid of it so I just live with it now. If you have a look at This Site it contains the boot process for XP. I tried mucking around with the registry and editing the services marked as boot in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

\SYSTEM\Services but it only helped a little.

I would watch out though because I disabled my cd-writer when I tried to disable too much. I also tried mucking around with things todo with hardware detection, as apparently its in the boot process just before the windows xp boot screen appears, but it led to nothing. Anyway have a read at that website, its rather interesting :)

Oh yeah and I dont think its got something todo with how fast your computer is, my PII 266 never did it running windows XP, and also I dont think the speed of your HDD has much to do with it as well, altough that was my first guess because it seems to seek alot during that time (Maybe its loading drivers???). But yeah I really dont know what it is because it just happens randomly without doing anything to my computer

Grand Master

John Veteran

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If you have a look at This Site it contains the boot process for XP.

Looking at that site, I'm willing to bet that it's this:

If the selected operating system is XP, NTLDR will continue the boot process by locating and loading the DOS based NTDETECT.COM program to perform hardware detection.QUOTE]

It's probably scanning the hardware :yes:

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