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I've noticed some weird behavior when dual-booting Windows 7 and Windows XP:
As long as I'm rebooting from Windows 7, everything is normal.
However, if I boot into Windows XP and then boot back from XP into Windows 7, my boot process differs slightly:
The boot stage is slower (i.e. the stage with the glowing Windows logo takes about twice as long) -- Windows seems to be doing some more work every time I'm coming from XP.
However, the extra time is CPU time -- the hard disk isn't accessed much during that time.The login process is faster (as though everything was already loaded/prefetched)
Overall, the process is a bit slower.
My guess is that it has to do with something related to NTFS, but I really have no real evidence.
Does anyone know what triggers this? (I have Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 x64 SP1.)
Update:
I just booted from Windows 8 back into Windows 7, and that also seemed to cause the delay...
Not sure if this has any affect on booting W7 after XP...http://bertk.mvps.org/html/dualboot.html
– Moab – 2011-11-12T02:34:25.847@Moab: That's a very interesting read, but yeah, it turns out that I've also disabled system restore and any backup/shadow-copy-related stuff on both OSes. – user541686 – 2011-11-12T02:36:55.720
1Makes me wonder what other tampering XP is doing to the W7 installation though. – Moab – 2011-11-12T04:23:11.217
@Moab: Haha yeah. If I had to hazard a guess, I would think it might be related to TxF -- maybe some log files are getting deleted or something, which causes Windows to check a bunch of stuff? But no idea really... – user541686 – 2011-11-12T04:26:07.953
Thanks for the Q. I "felt" something different too. Could look into the disk clusters or disk edit and try and see there? Surely MS knows, mabey they told somewhere? – Psycogeek – 2011-11-12T06:57:32.960
@Psycogeek: Oh gee, where do I start? My partition is 100 GiB, and Windows writes tens (if not hundreds) of megabytes of data to the disk while booting... the only way for me to find out would be to create a virtual machine, but that's way more work than I can do right now, and I'm not even sure if it would give me back useful data... – user541686 – 2011-11-12T07:00:02.177
@Mehrdad see this page, try boot logging, http://superuser.com/questions/261481/services-exe-batters-disk-writes-on-startup/334111#334111
– Moab – 2011-11-12T16:44:20.003@Moab: The trouble is, I don't see anything there. It's hard to tell if I'm triggering this or not -- sometimes it triggers, sometimes it doesn't -- but I don't see anything suspicious happening. – user541686 – 2011-11-13T19:38:52.070
I suppose you have each O/S in a separate partition ? – harrymc – 2012-01-09T10:28:09.227
@harrymc: Yeah. – user541686 – 2012-01-09T15:22:29.400
What is the exact process you use to "boot back from XP into Windows 7"? – harrymc – 2012-01-09T15:49:39.090
@harrymc: Uhm, what? "Start" -> "Turn off computer" -> "Restart" -> select Windows 7 on boot loader. (Did you expect me to say "I hibernate my computer" or "I pull the power plug" or something?) – user541686 – 2012-01-09T15:54:43.987
The difference is between warm and cold reboot. I now understand that you are doing a warm reboot, which may explain something. What happens for cold reboot ? (shutdown xp completely, then hit the power button to boot into 7) – harrymc – 2012-01-09T16:24:15.663
@harrymc: Hmmm... before I try it, could you please explain why/how exactly you suspect that could cause the difference? – user541686 – 2012-01-09T16:32:02.997
1Cold reboot initializes the hardware more thoroughly. For example, a warm reboot between Windows/Linux might show the wrong hour. Sometimes cold reboot is the only solution for such problems. – harrymc – 2012-01-09T17:14:43.913
@harrymc: O___O mind = blown. I just tried it a bunch of times and it seems to be 100% consistent with what you're saying... what's funny is that it doesn't happen on Windows XP or on Windows 8, though. I'll test it a bit more to make sure this is the issue but please post it as an answer since it looks like the correct answer! :O – user541686 – 2012-01-09T17:24:16.237