25 second delay before MBP boots

[pesos]

got a new SR mbp -- promptly wiped it and installed Vista. I had to tweak the partitions a bit to make it happy - basically I used the OS X disc to run the disk utility and partition a 30 GIG msdos partition and leave the rest as empty space. Vista was then happy and installed to this partition (reformatted as NTFS).

everything works great - however when I first turn on the laptop, it chimes and then sits on the blank grey screen for a good 20-25 seconds before it finally turns black, and then boots vista. very annoying since this greatly increases my total boot time.

any ideas why this would be? does it have to do with some kind of partition table or something?

thanks!
Wes

 

[jamesarm97]

I had a similar problem. I think it is a setting is system options to set the boot drive to the os x partition, otherwise it scans for bootable drives at startup and takes some time.

 

[MBHockey]

Boot to the OS X install disk and go into Startup Disk. Choose your Vista partition for the primary startup disk, and then reboot.

 

[pesos]

cool, now it's more like 8 seconds of grey only...

thanks guys!

 

[MBHockey]

No problem. Just curious, why did you ditch OS X entirely -- did you try it and not like it?

 

[pesos]

I needed to get the machine up and running ASAP (I'm a windoze sys admin). When I have a little more time I plan to go back and dual-boot with boot camp - or possibly even just run parallels. I need to get the key-remapping all figured out before I decide for sure. How does key remapping work with parallels - can you set it so it switches while you're focused on Windoze apps only?

 

[MBHockey]

See if this helps you:

 

[NorCalLights]

I needed to get the machine up and running ASAP (I'm a windoze sys admin). When I have a little more time I plan to go back and dual-boot with boot camp - or possibly even just run parallels. I need to get the key-remapping all figured out before I decide for sure. How does key remapping work with parallels - can you set it so it switches while you're focused on Windoze apps only?

I installed a key-mapping program in my XP Virtual machine... works like a charm. It even gives me num-lock and scroll-lock keys (mapped to unused F keys)