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Extremely SLOW Load Up Time for an Old System (Before OS is even installed) **Update: Fixed**

K

KeyserSoze

Diamond Member
Hi people, I have a problem. I gutted out my dad's old system to give to my nephew, cuz he needs something to run some older games on.

It's a PII 350, with 128 RAM, Standard CD-Rom, and Floppy.

When I turned it on the first time, it took an extremely long time to boot and recognize the hardware. I thought that it was only because it was the FIRST time, after I rebuilt it. But now, every time I turn it on, it takes about three minutes to recognize all the hardware. The system is the EXACT same configuration as it was on my dad's system, with the exception of the hard drive. (And I'm gonna be doing a full format, and reinstall of the OS) And when I go into the BIOS, everything is recognized properly. I'm trying to install Win98 SE, and when I put in the Boot Disk, and CD in, it just takes FOREVER to load that.

Anyone have any ideas? I've already gone into the BIOS, and Loaded "Defaults."

I understand this MIGHT not be the best forum to post this in, but I thought it would alright since I'm concerned with the slow boot time on it.

(Bear in mind, there is NO OS installed yet, I want to get this figured out first.) I have already checked the jumpers on the hard drive, and everything is exactly as it's supposed to be.


I appreciate any ideas/help. And Thanx in Advance.

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Success.

It was a Jumper Problem. The Hard Drive was set to MASTER, and it was, but it was only ONE drive I was using. So, it was still searching for a secondary device I guess. I removed the jumper altogether, and it worked normally. (It's an older Western Digital Hard Drive.)

Thanks for the help and suggestions.
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KeyserSoze
 
I recently had a very similar issue with my Thinkpad laptop. Turned out when my usb fingerpring reader was attached to the 'wrong' USB port, the newest Thinkpad bios got very very upset trying to treat it as a keyboard or mouse device at startup. The symptoms where it literally took minutes for the machine to post and get XP starting to load.

I doubt you have the fingerprint device, but any chance the kb/mouse is usb? You might want to try freeing all the usb ports and using a ps2 kb just as a test (realize this is a long shot, but....)

Bill
 
A few things from my experiences come to mind:

If the hard disk drive's jumpers are not set correctly, it will take a long time for the drive to be recognized. Make sure that you have the jumpers set to master and the cables hooked up correctly. Also, try another hdd cable if you have one.

Do you have the CD-ROM and HDD on the same channel? If so, you may want to connect them to different channels, each as the master.

There are settings in the BIOS that affect the speed of the boot. For example, my BIOS has a feature that checks the RAM. This takes a long time, so I disabled it.

Also, if you used default settings in the BIOS, the system is trying to boot from the floppy, the CDROM, and then the HDD. This can also slow things down.

Additionally, I once unknowingly reversed the floppy cable and my system took a really long time to boot.
 
If the hard disk drive's jumpers are not set correctly, it will take a long time for the drive to be recognized. Make sure that you have the jumpers set to master and the cables hooked up correctly. Also, try another hdd cable if you have one.
Click to expand...

That's what usually caused slow bootups in systems that I've built. Double check the jumper settings. Some hard drives have a "single" setting.

 
Check the HD cable. I recently installed a cdrw in my sisters old 400mhz computer and switched the hd cable with the cdrom cable since the it was longer and had a place on it to install another device where the other cable didn't. Turned on the computer and the darn thing forever to boot and load windows. I couldn't figure out what was wrong for the longest time and then I had the thought that maybe the cable that I switched was causing the problem. I ended up replacing the cable with a new one and everything works great. Try that.
 
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