5/8 second BIOS delay..is this normal?

[akashwiz]

Well I have a Athlon 64 bit 3000+ processor (venice) attached to ASUS K8V-MX board and 512 RAM. I have one 80 GB harddisk on primary master and one DVD-ROM on secondary master. And a 80 GB SATA drive on SATA1. If I disable the Onchip SATA Boot ROM in BIOS and boot the system into windows 98 from my normal harddisk, there is a 4-5 second delay before windows starts booting. If I enable the Onchip SATA Boot ROM setting in BIOS, this delay is around 7-8 seconds. I just wanted to know from people, is this delay normal or there is something causing this. I have already played with all the settings in BIOS and could only increase this delay not decrease it. I am also confused about two similar settings in BIOS.

Onchip SATA Enabled/Disabled
Onchip SATA Boot ROM Enabled/Disabled

Whats the differnce between the two? According to me changing the former doesn't have any effect. Whether its set to enabled/disabled doesn't mean anything, its the BOOT ROM thing which matters. Am I right?

Best Regards
Akash😕

 

[aGreenAgent]

Don't worry about the boot delay. Usually what it's doing is checking your computer for any bootable devices. It can take a few seconds.

Onchip SATA Enabled/Disabled turns the SATA chip in your computer on and off.

Onchip SATA Boot ROM Enabled/Disabled determines whether or not you can boot off your SATA drive. Obviously, if the computer can boot off SATA drives, it'll take longer when looking for boot devices.

 

[Slikkster]

And if that's really what's happening (checking for boot devices), you might want to just go into your Boot order menu and see if you can set all menu choices for the same device: your primary hard drive.