Win7 x64 My system didn't used to have a System Reserved Partition. It booted in 14 seconds (beep to desktop). However I noticed that I couldn't do such things as enter safe mode or restore a Windows image, and figured that the necessary files where missing (not sure if that's correct behavior for a system without a SRP, or if I messed it up at some point...). So I created a System Reserved Partition, and all now works fine, except that it now takes 32 seconds to boot. Googling only seems to bring up people having issues with multi-minute boot times, so couldn't find anything relevant. Would be grateful for any tips.
It looks like you are using an ssd for boot drive, and using MBR scheme, not UEFI. I don't think it's related to SRP, but maybe related to possible misalignment (improper partition starting offset) that caused the slow boot. run msinfo32 and find the starting offset of your boot disk partitions. All the offsets have to be divisible by 4096 (equals a whole number and not a decimal). otherwise you need to align your SSD.
Sorry - yes AFAIK it's MBR and it is an SSD. It looks like the offsets are all okay - have attached a couple of screenshots. Thanks for the reply!
Having the SRP or not shouldn't affect booting speed. If you recreated the booting files when your changed the layout it's possible they're using different settings. Also, have you verified the BIOS settings are the same as before? Some have settings that can greatly affect boot-up speed. Even having a different/additional drive plugged in can affect the time if the BIOS is set to find them (USB drives, for example).
Thanks for the reply. How could I tell if the boot files might now be using different settings? I don't think the BIOS settings have changed, but I just tried playing with them and can't find anything that makes a difference. I don't have any USB drives connected. Disabling all third party stuff in msconfig makes essentially zero difference to boot time. Now that I think of it, I think I added a SRP a couple of years ago, noticed the increase in boot time, and promptly removed it. So my issue does at least appear to be repeatable!
taotoo, It should be easy to test whether the SRP is causing a problem. I expect you still have booting files in the Win7 partition so use a trial BIBM CD to make the Win7 partition System, Active. Change it back if you don't like it. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=492
Thank you Brian - just tried it and unfortunately it didn't make any difference. I'm pretty sure I did it correctly as Disk Management shows the C partition as now being System and Active. I never use safe mode and can restore a windows image from an installation cd presumably, so am considering ditching the SRP again.. would love to get to the bottom of it though.
Fixed it, yay! In case it helps anyone in the future, here's what I did: Ran a boot trace: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_sto...o-collect-a-good-boot-trace-on-windows-7.aspx (set logging mode to file, and the program automatically does the AMD64 fix). Noticed that for the first half of the boot my backup drive was being accessed intensively. The C partition wasn't being accessed at all until this was finished. Saw that autochk.exe was the culprit. Tried to clear the disk's dirty bit by running chkdsk /f, but it made no difference. Went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/ControlSessionManager/ and cleared the value for the REG_MULTI_SZ value BootExecute, and problem solved. Not sure if I caused it by doing something else at the same time as creating an SRP, or if creating the SRP was the culprit...
