ABiT KT7-RAID and slow booting

[T00L]

Hello.... I recently setup a new system for a friend and everything is OK except that it takes forever to boot. Once it gets to the HPT370 bios screen and is searching for the drives it takes about a minute to see the 2 Western Digital 30GB ATA-100 drives.. (model WD300BBRTL).... after that is also seems to take a while at the verifying DMI data prompt.... Any ideas what is wrong here or is that how long it will take to boot up in a RAID configuration? This is my first time setting up an AMD system so maybe I have some settings wrong.

I have the 3 boot device options set to Ultra ATA-100/RAID as it said to do in the manual.

Thanks,
T

 

[subhuman]

This is another reason I don't suggest the KT7-RAID board. The Highpoint BIOS takes forever to load.

Have you tried flashing to the latest Highpoint BIOS? Get it over at Highpoint's website. Note that it didn't seem to help the BP6 I tried it on but it uses the HPT366 chip.

Another trick to help speed up boot time, is to set your IDE channels which are not connected to anything to "None" in the Abit BIOS instead of "Auto" -- this way the computer doesn't look for drives which don't exist. If this exists in the Highpoint BIOS as well, this might help.

 

[wxjunkie]

Are you sure you have all of the devices to be auto config'ed in the BIOS? When I changed to this setting the boot up is fine, no delays at all.

 

[StickHead]

Do you have a network card on it waiting for a server to assign you an IP address?

 

[gimps]

You must go into the HPT370 BIOS and indicate the speed of the drives. I had the same problem when I first built this system with the Abit KT7-RAID. If the speed setting is incorrect in the HPT370 BIOS, it will sit forever at the "Verifying DMA Data Pool..." prompt, and you will also have problems accessing the drives on the controller.
Something else you most likely already know, you must use the 80-wire cable to use ATA66/100, otherwise if you set the BIOS to DMA4, it will still take forever at the prompts.