I have recently installed win2000 and winxp in the primary master disk and Red Hat Linux 7.3 in the primary slave disk in a P4 system. The problem occurs only during the startup of win2000 (There is a delay about 4-5minutes) There is a delay in the progress bar and then another stop after preparing the network connections. When the desktop appears the system halt for a while and then it starts opperating normally. (It seems that the hard disk does not work during these delays) I have made a new clean install in the primary master disk of win98, win2000, winxp and the system is ok. The problem started again when i installed in the primary slave disk Red Hat 7.3. I start thinking that the problem has something to do with win2000 and Linux as all the other OS work fine.

I ran into this problem and found that I had a flaky DVD drive. All the other OS's seemed to ignore the problem, but 2000 would stop and stare for 4 to 5 min. on log in. Once I changed the drive the boot-up took much less time, but 2000 at best isn't speedy