PC taking an unusually long time to boot up

[Brodieman]

My hard drive of several years recently got sent to a farm in the countryside, so today I installed a new 200GB Western Digital drive. Aside from losing everything I've ever loved, the transition has been going fairly smooth. One rough spot though, is the now ridiculous time it's taking my PC to boot up. I'm talking about the black BIOS screen that first comes up where it checks the CPU and RAM and IDE drives. Before, that would come up and be gone in a second, now it stalls for about 15-20 seconds after displaying my BIOS information, then displays everything in a flash and continues as normal. Is this a case of my new hard drive simply breaking itself in, or is something wrong?

 

[hjo3]

I may be wrong, but I seem to remember that some BIOSes will do this unless you have them autodetect (or you manually enter) the hard drive's stats (cylinders, heads, etc.) and then save the configuration. If the BIOS can't accurately detect the HDD, there might be a problem with the drive. If the procedure I mentioned doesn't work, download and run the diagnostic tools from the HDD mfr's web site (they're usually in a boot disk form).