Asus A7N8X - Extremely long delay at boot time

[JLM]

Hi,

During the boot time, it takes an extremely long delay between the IDE and
SCSI devices information.
The reason is not the IDE devices detection because it is already done, nor
the SCSI devices detection as the delay is before the Adaptec CTRLA message
to enter into the BIOS. Nothing happens, no information displayed, just a
very long moment (more than 1 minute) to wait.

A7N8X rev 1.06 - BIOS rev 1007
Athlon XP 2000+
Memory 2 x 256 DDR400
Harddisk IDE Maxtor Diamond Plus
Video Asus V6800
2930U SCSI Adapter
Creative SB Live! 5.1 Digital (onboard audio disabled)

Can somebody tell me whether it is normal or not and then why it is not ?
Is there a way to reduce this delay ?

Many Thanks
Jean-Luc

 

[David]

Might be the hard drive. Simple way to check, unplug the ide cable and boot
up, if it goes fast then check the jumpers on the hd to make sure they are
set correctly

 

[Chris Wilson]

Hi,

During the boot time, it takes an extremely long delay between the IDE and
SCSI devices information.
The reason is not the IDE devices detection because it is already done, nor
the SCSI devices detection as the delay is before the Adaptec CTRLA message
to enter into the BIOS. Nothing happens, no information displayed, just a
very long moment (more than 1 minute) to wait.

A7N8X rev 1.06 - BIOS rev 1007
Athlon XP 2000+
Memory 2 x 256 DDR400
Harddisk IDE Maxtor Diamond Plus
Video Asus V6800
2930U SCSI Adapter
Creative SB Live! 5.1 Digital (onboard audio disabled)

Can somebody tell me whether it is normal or not and then why it is not ?
Is there a way to reduce this delay ?

Many Thanks
Jean-Luc

I had this with a WD SATA 1st drive and a none SATA Maxtor 2nd drive.
Disconnecting the second drive fixed it. Maxtor were aware of an
"issue" with even the latest bios on these boards, in the end I swapped
the 2nd none SATA 2nd drive for a matching Western Digital SATA drive,
and ran the pair as a RAID. If you have another drive, try it.

 

[sigmun]

I recently bought a new drive, Seagate 120GB PATA 8MB Cache, and plug it as
master and the "old" WD 120GB as a slave. There was a very long delay at
boot up when I unplugged the power cable of the slave, just to assure that
the software was correctly installed in the new disk because the old one
still have the windows XP installed. I fix that delay when I plugged again
the slave disk.



Make sure that you have all cables correctly (power and ata/ide) plugged in,
if that doesn't solve your problem consider to clear CMOS.



BTW, I have the same board (rev. 1.06) with latest bios 1007

 

[sigmun]

Make sure that you have all cables correctly (power and ata/ide) plugged

in,

and disk jumpers, this is important

 

[Gino Zantafio]

First, disabling "press Ctrl-A key..." during SCSI boot shortens the
operation. I don't know why.
Second, did you recently install a new SCSI peripheral? If yes, did you
verify all the SCSI parms in the SCSI setup ?
Ctrl-A key (or Ctrl-Q on AZERTY keyboards) then navigate in the menus. Hé hé
Jean-Luc, tu as un clavier AZERTY, je le vois d'ici !
Especially, you need to have the correct sync mode ... It's possible also
that the new peripheral doesn't match the current SCSI settings.
Third, do check your SCSI terminator if correctly placed and if no bad
contacts. Remove and inspect it.
Of course, unpluging every SCSI connector and inspecting it should not be
harmful !

 

[Arnie Berger]

Hi,

During the boot time, it takes an extremely long delay between the IDE and
SCSI devices information.
The reason is not the IDE devices detection because it is already done, nor
the SCSI devices detection as the delay is before the Adaptec CTRLA message
to enter into the BIOS. Nothing happens, no information displayed, just a
very long moment (more than 1 minute) to wait.

A7N8X rev 1.06 - BIOS rev 1007
Athlon XP 2000+
Memory 2 x 256 DDR400
Harddisk IDE Maxtor Diamond Plus
Video Asus V6800
2930U SCSI Adapter
Creative SB Live! 5.1 Digital (onboard audio disabled)

Can somebody tell me whether it is normal or not and then why it is not ?
Is there a way to reduce this delay ?

Many Thanks
Jean-Luc

This may be entirely wrong, but I remember that when I had an Adaptec
2930U SCSI controller card I had the same problem. It was caused by
the controller searching every possible scsi address to see if there
was a device out there and it would sometimes wait a long time when it
was doing this. As I recall, I was able to solve it by going into the
SCSI BIOS during boot-up and disabling one of the options. I remember
that the answer came from a Minolta SCSI film scanner FAQ note.

Arnie

 

[JLM]

Thanks you all,
The jumper setting of the IDE was wrong (cable select enabled).
I remove it, then the IDE detection is faster and I have now delay at all.
JLM