WinxP Pro "idling" on bootup

Very weird. After the POST screen, it goes to black, sits there for about 30 seconds, then chugs away for about 5 seconds before the WIn XP boot screen appears. PC then sits and idles for a further second with the 'progress bar' going along but no HD access. Finally it boots into XP and is fine thereon.

Odd problem, it's my old PC with my old-old HD (20GB ATA66 Seagate), which worked fine before it got reformatted. Obviously made sure that DMA was on - but it looks to me as if XP is expecting or scanning for something (thought it may have been the NIC, but no difference when I take it out).

It's not really an issue, but as its now a hand-me-down for my parents, you kinda want it to just work. Which it did for the three years I had it

I havent put SP1a on it yet, but I doubt it would make a diffenece. Wondered if anyone had experienced it before. I have changed the order of any PCI cards since reinstalling...

Grr

Sorry, first para should read "... idles for a further THIRTY seconds with the 'progress bar' going along but no HD access."

It's also on dialup access, so the NIC is just there when I need to copy shit over from my laptop.

Is there a NIC which is looking for a DHCP server? Give it a static IP..

lol is it faster than say 300mhz???
is ur hdd defragged? mine was 98% fragmented which is why i reinstalled yesterday it was goin far to slow
and yea do u have a network it may be trying to search through? is ur ram ok? has ur hdd maybe just had it? is there a file that may be missing from your os? quite a few theory's really

It's a PIII 800 with 512mb of RAM, so it's probably quick enough...just.

The one thing I didn't do was a an intense format before installing XP, so I'll nuke it again and see how that goes. THe NIC is not connected to any network and it made no difference when I disabled it.

We'll see how it goes...

yea sounds like ur problem lies in the formatting of ur harddrive dude try it again, completely delete the partition and start again