Unresponsive Desktop at boot: 3-5 minutes to start working!

[SpywareDr]

Looks like all three of your hard drives are having some trouble:

1. Your Maxtor 6L200M0 (200GB), drive letter's C: and X:
   
   
   Hardware ECC Recovered: 0000005DC5 [equals 24,005 decimal]
   Reallocation Event Count: 00000000BB [equals 187 decimal]
   Current Pending Sector Count: 000000000B [equals 11 decimal]
   
   
2. Your Western Digital WD2500JD (250GB), drive letter D:
   
   
   Temperature: 51 °C - Warning (50 °C to 55 °C)
   
   
3. Your Maxtor 6V080E0 (80GB), drive letter Z:
   
   
   Hardware ECC Recovered: 00000002C3 [equals 707 decimal]

Especially the first one containing your partitions C: and X:.

[Tw@in28]

Ehm...drat....
Well, I guess I'll sniff around and see if I can find and buy some new HDD...would you recommend changing all three?

I should point out, in any case, that I don't believe the issue to be entirely hardware-related...I have a linux partition booting in less than 30 seconds, on the same system...so there must be something I can do, before changing my HDDs, to improve my boot speed in Win7....

[Midknyte]

Those are pretty small drives by today's standards, so you could just get one 500GB-1TB drive to replace all 3.

I'd replace the drive before you waste time trying to resolve software issues. If the hardware is bad, you're already fighting a losing battle. Maybe you lucked out and the linux partition is on a section without bad sectors.

[SpywareDr]

The Maxtor's need to be replaced but the WD should be fine for a while if you can lower its temp a bit.

Western Digital WD Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive 5-year warranty - $89.99

[dneilson]

The Maxtor's need to be replaced but the WD should be fine for a while if you can lower its temp a bit. 

One of these should do it.

http://www.newegg.com/Hard-Drive-Coo...drive%20cooler

[Tw@in28]

I went for a Seagate ST1000DM003 1TB, which seemed spacious, cheap and solid enough for me.
I will trash the two Maxtor drives and keep the WD one (which, incidentally, is be the oldest one in the lot :P ), giving it more space on the rack. This way, it should get more fresh air: I'm guessing the reason for its high temperature is related to the fact right now that HDD is the lowest one on the rack. If the temperature situation does not change with the new HDD configuration, I'll buy a cooler as well.

Would you recommend me to clone my existing system partitions, so to "paste" them on the new HDD and simply re-adjust my bootloader? I'd hate having to reinstall everything, since it would probably take ages to get back to my actual configuration...and I can't even remember every giffy feature I piled in, during the years...

[SpywareDr]

Do you really want to copy the "Unresponsive Desktop at boot: 3-5 minutes to start working!" onto a brand new hard drive?

A fresh install will clean out the cobwebs.

[Tw@in28]

Do you really want to copy the "Unresponsive Desktop at boot: 3-5 minutes to start working!" onto a brand new hard drive?

A fresh install will clean out the cobwebs.

Sigh! I was afraid you'd give me this answer.... I guess you're right....
Is there some tool I could use to list my installed software (maybe offering to backup my user data as well), and automate their re-installation a little bit?

[Train]

Print Directory
http://www.karenware.com/powertools.asp

Just point it at the Programs and programx86 folders

Been using it over 10 years now.

[SpywareDr]

To get a list of your installed programs:

1. Click Start, type cmd.exe, and press [Ctrl][Shift][Enter].
   
   (Pressing [Ctrl][Shift][Enter] instead of simply pressing [Enter] opens cmd.exe with Administrator privileges. IOW, an 'elevated' cmd prompt).
   
   
2. Type wmic and press [Enter].
   
   (You should now be at a "wmic:root\cli>" prompt. WMIC = Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line).
   
   
3. Type /output:C:\ProgList.txt product get Description,InstallDate,Name,Vendor,Version and press [Enter].
   
   (And then wait for the "wmic:root\cli>" prompt to return to the screen).
   
   
4. Type quit and press [Enter].
   
   
5. Type notepad c:\proglist.txt&exit and press [Enter].

--

PCMag.com: The Beginner's Guide to PC Backup

Paragon Backup & Recovery 2013 Free

Wikipedia: List of Backup software

[Tw@in28]

Many thanks for the suggestions
My new HDD has just arrived, and I already took a comprehensive backup of the two faulty HDDs with Paragon Backup&Recovery.
Tonight, I will take yet another backup with Microsoft's migration tool - now Windows Easy Transfer (which helped me a lot, when I migrated from WinXP to Win7), then tomorrow I'll make the jump.

Thank you all again for your support. I will report back here, when migration is successfull, and let you know how all this went.

[SpywareDr]

You're more than welcome. And best of luck.

Curious to know how much faster it boots up ...

[Tw@in28]

I'm back online, after a night of hard work.
First thing I tried was a complete reinstall of Windows 7 x64. Booted up to responsive (if bare) desktop in around 45 seconds. :P
I used Windows Easy Transfer to import my userdata from a backup, and it worked quite good, but, for some unknown reason, Windows would not recognize my internet adapter, nor would it accept transferred drivers for wifi, GPU and sound support....basically, I was left with a quite messy 640x480 desktop.
Being curious by nature, I decided to take the ultimate gamble: restoring a partition backup I made with Paragon Backup & Restore.
But I had no blank DVD to create a recovery media disk...so I ran the program and created a bootable USB recovery media disk and with it I recovered the entire C: and X: partitions from a backup (of course, taking the risk my system might still boot slowly.... ).
The process took 2 hours, and produced an unbootable disk.
Being a sly old fox, I understood this was due to wrong MBR settings in the bootloader (of course, Ubuntu and GRUB were installed on the old HDD, so Win7 bootloader was just acting fizzy): I rebooted with Windows 7 install DVD and chose to recover a previous installation. The disc immediately recognized the issue and re-wrote the broken MBR (the operation took less than a minute).
I rebooted and here I am, back again in my Windows desktop, with all my installed applications too (it even recovered the desktop icons' layout)!

Desktop now boots in around 45 seconds + 16 seconds for icon cache reload (I have 90 icons on my desktop, and, as far as I know, the refresh is unavoidable), which is pretty fast, considering my previous issues!

I should add that system now seems to be responsive immediately after icon refresh, so I guess this counts as a success story!

I will confirm my first impressions in the following hours, but I believe this could be the end of my issue...
Many thanks to all who contributed to diagnose and suggest useful tools!!

[Tw@in28]

I'm back: I rebooted a couple of times more, each time with my clock at hand, and I'd say system works fine in 1-1.30 minutes since auto-login screen...and that's fine by me!
Many Thanks to everyone who helped me fix the system.
Special kudos to SypwareDr, who patiently assisted me since my first post.

[dneilson]

If you want a faster boot time yet use Hibernate. I have a Desktop and two Laptops using Hibernate and they're all at the Desktop ready to use in the 30 second area.