Way to delay WinXP's booting a little?

[trancejeremy]

Thanks to the colder weather, my hard drive seems to be taking a little extra time to get going in the morning, and thus failing to boot on the first try. (My computer boots fast, anyway, usually I can't even see the first screen before my monitor goes on).

If I delay the booting by about 10 seconds by going into the bios then exiting, it boots fine. But it's a pain to have to do that.

Is there any way, I can get Win XP to just pause for about 10 seconds?

 

[XCorvis]

It sounds like it's not WinXP you want to pause, it's the bios. Any setting you change in XP will take place after the hard drive is accessed, and you'll probably crash before that point.

Check your bios settings for something like a boot password, or other prompt. With the boot password set, it should prompt you to enter a password and wait until you do.

 

[DethStryke]

while what trance said is possibly accurate depending on what the real physical problem you're having is, an alternative that may work for you is to go into your hardware profiles for XP, create a copy of the current profile and set it to prompt at startup for which profile you want to choose. The first one will be default, but you can set how long a time in seconds it will wait for you to choose which one to use before bootup. That may give you the extra time you need and it will simply do it by itself without you having to put in a password (which is the point of your question, I think).

Hardware profiles can be found by Right-Clicking on My Computer, selecting Properties from the menu, then selecting the Hardware tab of the System Properties box that comes up. The bottom button of the Hardware tab is "Hardware Profiles". Push that and the window that comes up is pretty self explanatory with the description I provided above.

 

[trancejeremy]

Well, I'm not entirely sure what need the extra time to warm up; I only guessed hard drive because I did some seaching on the problem of not booting the first time while cold and the hard drive was the suggestion I found.

The hard drive actually works. It will boot, but hangs up between the black Win XP screen with the logo and the loading, and the blue screen that says it's starting windows. Normally there's like a 2-3 second pause between the two screens with a blank screen

I thought perhaps a card was a bit loose, and thus when it's cold doesn't fit completely in the socket, but I opened it up and checked.

Anway, I'll give that hardware profile selection thing a try, thanks for the suggestion.