When booting in the morning, my Windows 2000 Pro has been
getting through the banner page, then instead of
displaying the desktop icons, re-boots 1 or 2 more times
before completeing the startup. I have service pack 4.
Hard drive is 42% free, am on dsl, and have 1900+
processor speed. Norton antivirus, which I run at least
once a week. there is a sound from, I think, the hard
drive that sounds like it is running at a lower speed, and
is not steady for a while. then, when the startup
completes, it sounds just fine.

this has happened twice this week, and several times last
week too. any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Edward

Edward - odd hard drive sounds can mean impending disaster. In your
shoes I'd get in touch right away with the drive manufacturer, download
their drive diagnostic program (usually a floppy image, bootable; you
can't run good diagnostics from within an OS like W2k), and thoroughly
check the drive. In the meanwhile if possible I'd copy all precious
material from that entire drive (all partitions) to a different drive as
backup.

Note that if the manufacturer's diagnostic determines the drive has
serious problems, the tech support people will often ship you a swap
replacement drive. Drive warranties are years long. Often they'll let
you keep the old drive long enough to image the old drive to the new
before returning the old drive in the swap deal; just give them a visa
card number and they won't charge it unless you fail to return either
drive within the weeks allowed.

Edward Spengler wrote: