Slow boot times

[J22]

My boot times are extremely slow when my secondary hard drive is connected. My primary HD is a SATA 80gig WD. I'm using the NF7-S SATA controller. My secondary drive is an 80gig IDE WD. With just the primary connected, everything seems fine. I was using the Serillel adapter on my secondary drive and it got to the SATA device screen and seem to pause for ~20 seconds before booting. There also seemed to be a lag of 10-20 seconds between the screen going black and the Windows XP screen coming up. I disconnected the secondary, and it seemed to boot normally. I then removed the Serillel, and connected the secondary drive as my IDE secondary master. My DVD-R drive is the primary master. Now it takes forever (~30 seconds) to recognize my IDE drives when I first boot up. Eventually it boots, but its very slow.

On a possibly related note, I noticed that my "Multimedia Device" and "Raid Controller" both are using IRQ 11. I tried moving my Santa Cruz to a different PCI slot, but it still comes up as 11. Is this a problem? Is this causing my problem above?

 

[mechBgon]

Pull out the Western Digital and set its jumper to the "Single Drive" setting, that's the usual cure.

As for the IRQ's, it appears from the NF7-S's manual that the second, third and fourth PCI slots have IRQ's of their own, so use them first and leave 1 and 5 vacant if possible. It's not unusual to find a bunch of items sharing an IRQ in Windows, however... there's even a FAQ about it in AnandTech's FAQs.

Hope that helps