SATA drive slow to boot??

[Chris Wilson]

System is Asus A7N8X Deluxe PCB 2.00 with rev 4.1.50 Bios (as factory
supplied with board) Processor is AMD Athlon 1100. Memory is TwinMOS
DDR PC3200 in slots 1 and 3 totalling 1 gig and it came as a boxed
matched pair. Drives are 36 gig WD Raptor and 160 gig Maxtor. Both are
Serial ATA drives and the OS is 2000 Professional, service pack 4, with
the motherboard SATA driver loaded via F6 at OS install time. All
components are brand new, fresh install.

The problem is at boot up time, with all default bios settings, the BIOS
text scrolls by normally, then there is a two and a half minute to
three minute pause,
with a totally blank screen and no audible action from either hard drive
or floppy drive, and neither the CD nor the DVD drive start up, either.
After 2.5 minutes or so the system shows the bottom of screen Windows
scroll bar and Windows starts normally. Booting from the 2000 CD this
long period of inactivity is NOT present and it boots at what I assume to
be a normal speed.

By disconnecting the serial ATA lead to the second hard drive (Maxtor)
the system boots normally. I have formatted both drives using NTFS to
their full capacity by means of each manufacturers formatting tools.
Windows sees and can use the correct sizes. Once booted the system works
fine.
Can anyone suggest, in the simplest terms, what might
be going wrong please? I have tried it with just one memory card in, and
tried both of them individually, with no difference. I suspect something
either in the bios, or maybe I need a different SATA driver? Perhaps I
should have just bought two WD drives?

Thanks.

 

[Alceryes]

That is weird.
Try setting the boot order in BIOS so that the WD Raptor is the only
available boot device and see if that speeds it up. Also try putting the
Maxtor on a Parallel IDE (leaving only the Raptor on the SATA). Also, I
don't know if it is an option in BIOS or not but see if there is a setting
that enables (or disables) the RAID function on the SATA adapters.
Hope one of these helps.

 

[kony]

Perhaps I should have just bought two WD drives?

.... or two Maxtors if your WD is jumpered wrong.