Folks,

Below is an extract from an earlier posting regarding this subject and I am having the same "slow to boot" problem. Can anyone please shed some light?

Sungki Lee

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I've done it enough times now on both my Sony Vaio GRX550 and my Dell desktop to know its not my imagination as has been suggested when I've asked this question elsewhere.

Both machines are dual boot. The Vaio is RH 7.3 / Windows 2000 and the Dell is SuSE 8 / Windows 2000. The mere presence of the Linux partitions seems to make Windows grind and grind away on the hard disk every so SLOOOOWLY (much more than usual) when it is booting. When it finally gets going it works okay. Windows is somehow confused by the Linux partitions although it doesn't do any damage like try to 'repair' them. The problem disappears immediately if I delete the Linux partitions with Partition Magic.

Has anyone else experienced this? Its been suggested to me that I should 'hide' the Linux partitions to Windows but I don't see how. Neither Partition Magic or the disk manager in Windows lets me hide a Linux partition.

try this one

http://www.ranish.com/part/

What boot manager are you using? LILO? GRUB? or something else?

GRUB was used as the boot loader.

If you're saying RH 7.3 slowing down your PCs to a crawl, sorry, you're dead wrong.

I had it installed on my main box and a friend's box. None of the characteristics you mentioned above had occured to us.

It's obviously to me that your HD is either not properly jumped (Master/slave, cable select = screwed) or it has some kind of overlaying technology. Fujitsu comes to mind. I hate this brand.

Also, your mobo BIOS setup might be odd like it's swapping 2 HD's.

....is not with Red Hat or SuSE, neither is it with the Linux partitions (per se). No, the problem is with Windows.

Try this. Logon to Windows 2000 as an Administrator and open the Administrative Tools. Open further the Computer Management console and take a look at Disk Management.

Here you will see that Windows "sees" all of your partitions, including the Linux partitions. What I think is happening at boot is that Windows is trying to correctly determine the partitions and whether or not it has to mount them, and this is slowing down the boot.

My advice is to repartition how you install Linux on the machine.

You mention that you have PartitionMagic. Just as a suggestion, I use BootMagic for my bootloader, although I do not think that the bootloader is the problem here. It is the format of the partitioning.

Windows 2000 can correctly "see" Linux 'ext2' partitions. It cannot mount them, but it can "see" them. If you install using some other format -- such as ReiserFS or ext3, I believe your problems will be resolved. In my case, Windows cannot "see" the correct size of my ReiserFS partition, although it reports that space as healthy.

However, the reason I mentioned BootMagic is that BootMagic will only "see" ext2. The way I have worked around this is to use BootMagic to create the boot partition for Linux as a small ( 25 Mg ) ext2 partition -- allowing BootMagic to access it -- and create the swap partition with BootMagic as well.

Then, when I install Linux I adjust the size of the swap partition to three times my RAM and format the other paritions as something other than ext2 And, it is important to know that you must install LILO or GRUB on this small boot partition and not in the boot sector of the first partition.

That is my secret! I started with SuSE, and that is how I discovered how to do this. Good luck!

---ps

One other suggestion: I think the problem lies with the Logical Volume Manager in Windows 2000. If this is a fresh installation of Windows 2000, and the updates have not been run on it from WindowsUpdate, it could be that there is a "fix" for the LVM. I believe I saw this in the updates I found on this site.