Dual-boot with XP causes long boot time

jeffshead · 13 Oct 2019

One of my systems was dual-booted with two WinXPx32 installs. It was lightning fast when booting. The system has a 3GHz i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and the system disc is a SSD. BIOS, not UEFI and MBR.

I decided to reformat the second WinXP partition and install Win10x64 as a replacement. Since doing so, I get a blank screen for about 1.5 minutes until the boot options appear on the screen when booting or rebooting.

Is this normal when dual-booting Win10 with an old OS? I haven't dual-booted anything in years but I've never encountered a delay like this with any other OS. Just to be clear, once the boot menu displays, which ever OS I choose to boot, boots very fast. It just takes forever for the boot menu to appear. I'm not sure where to begin troubleshooting this.

spunk · 13 Oct 2019

Boot into Setup (Bios) go to Advanced look for Hardware Mode, Is it set to AHCI? or IDE/Legacy?
SSD's need to be set for AHCI, but XP does not support AHCI. .

NavyLCDR · 13 Oct 2019

In Windows 10, disable hibernation:

powercfg -h off

jeffshead · 13 Oct 2019

spunk said:

Boot into Setup (Bios) go to Advanced look for Hardware Mode, Is it set to AHCI? or IDE/Legacy?
SSD's need to be set for AHCI, but XP does not support AHCI. .

AHCI is set correctly in the BIOS. XP supports SATA drives if the correct controller driver is installed and like I said, everything was lightning fast before installing Win10 and it's boot manager taking over.

NavyLCDR said:

In Windows 10, disable hibernation:

powercfg -h off

Didn't make any difference.

Not sure what this indicates, but it does not take as long for the boot menu to appear when booting after a shutdown rather than from a reboot and it doesn't matter if I reboot from XP or Win10.

Here's what I have in Win10 Disk Management:

Dual-boot with XP causes long boot time-disk.jpg

Samuria · 13 Oct 2019

Your booting from win 10 disk not xp disk as xp isnt active

jeffshead · 13 Oct 2019

Samuria said:

Your booting from win 10 disk not xp disk as xp isnt active

So are you saying I need to remove active status from the Win10 partition and add active to the WinXP partition? XP can't boot anything newer than XP, right?

I also am confused by the fact that there isn't a small, reserved system partition.

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UPDATE:
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I stumbled across the ~~solution~~ workaround after wasting time reinstalling and restoring numerous times.

Solution:
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Busine...ht/true#M13098

I really thought the issue was with the Win10 boot manager because I did not encounter the issue with the XP/XP dual-boot; It wasn't until I went with the XP/Win10 dual-boot.