2 Issues - Floppy activity & Slow Boot

Hi all,
Running Vista Ultimate and for the most part all is well other than
two issues:

1) Intermittently when using Vista the floppy drive goes haywire - even
though there's no disk in the drive, the system seems to be trying to
access the drive for periods of time. Sometimes you here the noise and
see the activity light every 20-30 seconds for 15 minutes then it will
stop. If I plug in a USB device or open explorer it will start up again
for 10-15 minutes.

Thought maybe AV (Norton 360 - I don't need to be told ;-)) may be the
culprit. Installed this on XP and no problem. Basically I have exactly
the same startup software on XP Pro and never have the issue when I
boot into XP.

Any ideas?

2)Slow Vista boot. From the boot selection screen - XP has a usable
desktop in 20 seconds; Vista is still organising my desktop @ 90-120
seconds (it's usable after about 60 seconds but bloody slow until it
finishes it's boot process).

I've benchmarked both Partitions from within each OS (HD Tach)and get
burst speed of 245MB/s and 108MB/s average read speed. Even Vista rates
the drive @ 5.9. Basically, for the first half of the disk (where each
OSs partition is) the read spead never drops below 125MB/s)

Both XP & Vista are partion 1 on identical raid arrays. I have exactly
the same startup sw running on each os.

Earlier in the year had both OSs running on single HD and each boot was
slow. After clean installs on to identical Raid arrays. XP's boot time
is over 50% faster and Vista stayed the same.

All drivers up to date.

No problems reported in Event viewer.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Mick

System Specs
Gigabyte 965P-DQ6
Core 2 Duo E6600 @3.2 (457x7)
2G Corsair DDR 800 @ 914 (5-5-5-18)
4 x 250GB WD 16MB Cache (2 x 500MB Raid 0)
Raid_0, partition1 = Vista Sys
Raid_1, partition1 = XP Sys

Vista (overall) Performance Rating (5.7)
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 5.7
Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB 5.9
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 5.9
Gaming graphics 1406 MB Total available graphics memory 5.9
Primary hard disk 44GB Free (70GB Total) 5.9

Re1.
Have you tried to insert any floppy disk and check what ? is looking for?
Jack
"Mick" <> wrote in message
news:.. .
> Hi all,
> Running Vista Ultimate and for the most part all is well other than
> two issues:
>
> 1) Intermittently when using Vista the floppy drive goes haywire - even
> though there's no disk in the drive, the system seems to be trying to
> access the drive for periods of time. Sometimes you here the noise and
> see the activity light every 20-30 seconds for 15 minutes then it will
> stop. If I plug in a USB device or open explorer it will start up again
> for 10-15 minutes.
>
> Thought maybe AV (Norton 360 - I don't need to be told ;-)) may be the
> culprit. Installed this on XP and no problem. Basically I have exactly
> the same startup software on XP Pro and never have the issue when I
> boot into XP.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> 2)Slow Vista boot. From the boot selection screen - XP has a usable
> desktop in 20 seconds; Vista is still organising my desktop @ 90-120
> seconds (it's usable after about 60 seconds but bloody slow until it
> finishes it's boot process).
>
> I've benchmarked both Partitions from within each OS (HD Tach)and get
> burst speed of 245MB/s and 108MB/s average read speed. Even Vista rates
> the drive @ 5.9. Basically, for the first half of the disk (where each
> OSs partition is) the read spead never drops below 125MB/s)
>
> Both XP & Vista are partion 1 on identical raid arrays. I have exactly
> the same startup sw running on each os.
>
> Earlier in the year had both OSs running on single HD and each boot was
> slow. After clean installs on to identical Raid arrays. XP's boot time
> is over 50% faster and Vista stayed the same.
>
> All drivers up to date.
>
> No problems reported in Event viewer.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks
>
> Mick
>
> System Specs
> Gigabyte 965P-DQ6
> Core 2 Duo E6600 @3.2 (457x7)
> 2G Corsair DDR 800 @ 914 (5-5-5-18)
> 4 x 250GB WD 16MB Cache (2 x 500MB Raid 0)
> Raid_0, partition1 = Vista Sys
> Raid_1, partition1 = XP Sys
>
> Vista (overall) Performance Rating (5.7)
> Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 5.7
> Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB 5.9
> Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 5.9
> Gaming graphics 1406 MB Total available graphics memory 5.9
> Primary hard disk 44GB Free (70GB Total) 5.9
>
>

Hi,
Yeh, sorry I forgot to mention that one. Makes absolutely no difference
whether a disk is in the drive or not. Also, on the rare times I've
used it (only to copy files to flash the BIOS) it works fine from
within Vista.
Thanks
Mick




"Jack" <replyto@it> wrote in
news::

> Re1.
> Have you tried to insert any floppy disk and check what ? is
> looking for? Jack
> "Mick" <> wrote in message
> news:.. .
>> Hi all,
>> Running Vista Ultimate and for the most part all is well other
>> than two issues:
>>
>> 1) Intermittently when using Vista the floppy drive goes haywire
>> - even though there's no disk in the drive, the system seems to
>> be trying to access the drive for periods of time. Sometimes you
>> here the noise and see the activity light every 20-30 seconds for
>> 15 minutes then it will stop. If I plug in a USB device or open
>> explorer it will start up again for 10-15 minutes.
>>
>
>
>