Slow POSTing Hard Drive

StraightPipe

Golden Member
Feb 5, 2003
1,676
0
71
Ok, so I recently added a 60GB HDD to one of my older boxes, this is the 5th drive in the box, and I?ve unplugged an old DVD player so I can use its spot on the IDE ribbon. Currently I have setup as:
PM 17GB
PS 27GB
SM CD-RW
SS 60GB
The problem I?m running into is during post. Everything will eventually post and boot to windows, but right after it lists all the drives detected it hangs for 5-10 minutes before moving on to windows..

I have a controller card that came with a 200GB drive, and so I loaded this 60GB drive on the PCI card by itself . that time it boots the 2 Hdd?s and CD-R, then the controller card?s BIOS starts and it picks up the 60GB fine as PM on the card (using cable select jumper). it takes less than a minute for the card's bios to detect the drive, but the bios itself take a minute or two jsut to get to the detection stage.

The reason I haven?t been using the card is that I know theroretically my system should boot faster with all the drives plugged straight to the mobo with IDE?s, vs using the card which requires the use of a second bios. The problem is that the mobo?s bios is stalling after that 60GB is detected. All my jumpers are right. I?ve kinda narrowed it down to 2 things that could be holding it up.

1. Possibly DMA settings? (I really don?t know jack about these, what should I be using?)
2. Possible because I got the drive from my dell box. It had a 43 MB partition called ?dell_utilites? that didn?t go away when I formatted the main partition in Windows XP?s Disk manager.

Any ideas? I'd like to not have to break the partitions, and reformat again if i can help it, since Im already using the 60GB and dont wanna have to back it up again.


(BTW all drives are Western Digital, the controller card is a promise that came with a western didgital, and all drives passed the WD DataLifeGaurd Disk Diagnostics)
 

SearchMaster

Diamond Member
Jun 6, 2002
7,791
114
106
Check your Master/Slave settings - you may be better off explicitly setting these instead of using cable select.

Also, have you added any media readers or printers? I had a Canon i470d that has built-in CF/SM/etc. readers, and if the printer was on when the computer booted, it caused the same problem you describe. I believe it was trying to boot off the CF card or something, but never cared to track it down - just turning the computer off would fix it.