MSI Neo2 Platinum hangs at IDE seek intermittently

[Finnatic]

I'm hoping that someone can help me understand why my computer will occasionally hang when booting up or when being rebooted. It will occasionally get stuck at the Seeking IDE devices prompt, and if I leave the computer, and come back, it will eventually boot, but my Maxtor SATA hard drive will not be in my drive listing in Windows XP Professional. Another variation of this same problem is when I reboot, and I get past the IDE seek phase with no problems, but the Windows logo is very slow to come up. You can see a shadow of it as it starts to fade in on my computer screen, which could take a few minutes or longer to finally cycle through to the Windows XP logon screen. At this point, my Maxtor SATA hard drive will again not be found. My Raptor SATA is just fine in any of the above scenarios.

Does anyone have any advice as to what the problem could be? I don't believe it's a faulty SATA cable as I've never had problems with the drive bombing when it is 'sensed' properly by my motherboard and/or Windows XP Pro.

I've updated my motherboard bios to the latest non-beta version, too.

Thanks for your advice and assistance, everyone.

Here's my current setup:

AMD Athlon 64 3800+
2x512mb Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO
MSI Neo2 Platinum Nforce 3 Ultra Socket 939 <-- the problem?
Seagate Raptor 74 GB SATA Model WD740GD
Maxtor 300 GB SATA Model 6B300S0 <-- the problem?
BFG Geforce 6800GT OC AGP
Western Digital 160GB IDE
CompUSA 12x DVD-ROM IDE
Pioneer DVR-108 DVD+/- R/W IDE
Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum

 

[Ricemarine]

Ahh... I had this problem before... It sucked really. I have the same mobo and stuff... Same 300 GB hard drive...

Um..

-Have you loaded the raid drivers yet?.
-Have you stuck the SATA 300 GB on port 3 or 4?

 

[MobiusPizza]

IDE Seek?
All your drives are SATA

Try removing each suspected hardware one at a time
Remove the Maxtor HDD and try booting
Remove the Western Digital IDE Drive and try booting
Do the same for the DVD drives

Do a chkdsk on all drives

 

[nycdude]

I have a feeling it has to do with the raid setup option in the bios. I disabled the raid setup option. My 250 maxtor sata drive shows up in the system tray as a removable drive. Go figure.

sorry if this does not help ya.

 

[Makaveli]

why don't u tell us what version bios your running on that board! I have the same board using the 1.8 bios no problem. The 1.9bios with X2 support just came out also.

 

[Ricemarine]

1.9 bios has too many bugs...

They rushed it.