Super super slow boot problem

[NateTheGreat]

I have a machine in which I have installed WIN98SE on a Soltek AMD350 board. I need the older OS to use some dedicated software.

The machine boots unbelievably slow on the order of 15 min..

It has 64Meg memory and a 10GB hard disk with a Maxtor DDO (Dynamic Drive Overlay) (current) on it. It used to boot quick...but something has screwed it up. (Drives are c-g).

In safe mode of course the things boot quickly.
But after 15min., once it boots up it runs fine in NORMAL mode.
Hard Drives are not in MS-DOS compatibility mode.
No complaints of missing .vxd files are seen on the screen.

The boot log.txt shows load failures on mrci.vxd.

I think this is involved in doublespace (which I hope I an NOT using). Cleaning the registry with Norton did not help.

Suggestions on how to pursue this one?

Registry cleaning does not seem to help this one.

[NateTheGreat]

Reinstalling the 98SE OS does not help.

It just sits there with the little blue bar moving slowly in NORMAL BOOT mode.

There is no disk activity at all in SUPER SLOW BOOT MODE .

Thoughts on this one?

Faulty .dll, vxd, ini?

[Stec]

First, in BIOS, select the option named like "load defaults" or "load standard settings"
if don't have a floppy disable from bios
set boot order - CD then HDD0

do not use overclocking

save your data from harddisk

with a partitioning tool (partition magic) (or win98 bootdisk fdisk) delete all partitions and create only one (primary, FAT32) and check for bad sectors

boot with win98 cd

reinstall win
...and see...