2.5 minute boot up for A7V133 RAID?!?!?! anyone else?

[Mikendi]

I wrote to Asus and they said it was a long boot, but to flash to the avu1005a BIOS and new promise ATA/100 1.60 - I shaved a minute off (was 3.5) now 2.5 and I'm wondering if anyone else is having the same issue. I built this for a client and have to explain the long boot period.
A7V133 RAID
1gig AVIA @ 133mhz
512mb Mosel
GeForce2 GTS 250/380 (core/mem)
2 x 30gb Maxtor +45 7.2k rpm hdd's in raid 0
Tekram U-SCSI card
40x UltraPlex CD
8020 S&F SCSI CDR
SCSI Zip100
SBLive Platinum w/LiveDrive1
FireWire card
Linksys NIC

Sweet system and fast as Hell - 34.7 Average FSP in Vulpine GL mark 1.1p @ 1024 x 786

Any help with this boot lag will be appreciated - Thanks

 

[birddog]

not sure if this will help you or not. I had a real long pause in boot up of a system on a P3V4X (about a minute pause when the win98 logo came up). I tracked it down to the SB live value soundcard I had. When I performed a clean install (without the soundcard) I had no problem. As soon as I installed the soundcard drivers (and all the associated software in the 'auto' install), I had the problem again. Just uninstalling the drivers would not get rid of the boot up lag. After another clean install; I only loaded the most basic drivers needed for the soundcard manually (no legacy driver, no extra creative software) and it was fine then.

 

[Mikendi]

This is a Via133A chipset and with the latest BIOS and 4in1's I'm not having a SBLive issue. I did a selective install leaving out the DOS drivers and a few things no one uses. The problem I think is that it reads everything on boot - SCSI cards CD's CR's, the the RAID-0 array, etc. Then it goes to desktop. Oh well - I've had more annoying things happen.

 

[Rafael]

Well, have you checked the boot sequence in the BIOS? Is everything right?
Your HDDs are SCSI? Or you are using ATA100 ports?
I had a long boot here in my system, like BIRDDOG said. Long time waiting on the Windows 98 SE logo, not a 2.5 minutes waiting. But it was taking like 1 minute to load Windows. Then it was due to my NIC. Removed, reinstalled, same problem, then I had to change my NIC. I hope its not ur NIC. But you should try this.

Good luck!

Raf

 

[jamesbond007]

Another thing that you can do is specify an IP address and mask address for your TCP/IP protocol. That use to be my problem on a Win9x based system when I had dialup, but still had my LAN. I now have DSL which auto-assigns IPs, but that's a whole nother story.

What OS are you running, BTW?

 

[Rafael]

Really Jamesbond007? Gonna try that sometime this week on my old NIC.
See if its works!
Thnx for help me too!

Raf

 

[jamesbond007]

Yup, it's helped me out a lot. I guess some NICs are defaulted to search for a DHCP server of some sort to get an IP address. By specifying one, you will increase your boottimes, configuration dependent, of course.

A good internal setup, which is also one that I use for my LAN parties, is to start with 10.0.0.1 and a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. The next computer will have 10.0.0.2 and the same subnet mask, and so forth.

Good luck on your increase boottimes!

 

[Mikendi]

OK I configured the TCP/IP protocals and now it loads to desktop in 1minute 15sec. A major improvement I can live with. Thanks for the advice I overlooked that aspect. This is a cool place

 

[jamesbond007]

Hehehe. Nice to hear it worked well for you. That's not a shabby boottime, either.