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Windows 2000 Professsional Slowwww Boot

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by Member 34699403

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I manages several small domains. Recently I upgraded a workgroup to a domain with a Windows 2000 (Dell) server. One of the clients, Windows 200 Professional, now requires 19 to 22 minutes to completely boot up. My XP clients seem a tad slow but still boot much quicker than this. My event log shows nothing that should interfere with booting and I receive no errors. Once it has booted the workstation seems fine, connectivity is staying around the 100 mark. Suggestions anyone?

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by alpha-male

Ouch! That's an incredibly unacceptable boot time...and something *has* to be timing out there. It just has to be...

I would look at this methodically:

IF you haven't already, do a basic systems check (hardware, start up programs, etc). If alllooks well, then I would try booting with just basic network support. If it loads quickly it's a software/driver issue. If its the same, continue testing. Take a close look at your network card configuration, the protocols you are loading etc.
Getrid of anything you don't need. If your networking configuration is basic, it may be worth the effort to strip it out and set it up again in case something has become corrupted, etc.

If you don't see a problem there, set up a workstation to packet sniff the network. Start capturing packets and then power on the Dell Server. Don't touch any keys or anything on it (other than entering a password). Take a look at the communications going on, the kind of packets sent, the time on each packet, etc. Watch for errors, rebroadcasts, drops, and especially it searching for something that it never finds...

A great site to take a look at is www.packet-level.com

The books from Laura Chappell are indispensible for this kind of troubleshooting. The packets don't lie...this is truly looking at the "heartbeat of your network".

Good luck!

by Member 34699403

These basic steps are sometimes missed and I did set up a monitor to watch traffic. The final answer was gleaned through conversation and trouble shooting, but this helped considerably.

by Member 34699403

Thanks! Believe it or not it was real silly. Since my router was doing external DNS and my Server internal DNS, I simply changed the DNS seek order (putting the Server first, external second and third)and the boot/login process both shortened significantly. My router is also doing DHCP for now until the Firewall is in place so that also added to the mix. I did follow through with a local diagnostic to make sure the machine hadn't had a coincidental problem so your suggestions were very timely. Thanks again.

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