ATA Card slowed down boot-up

  • Thread starter Thread starter Honjo
  • Start date Start date
H

Honjo

Since installing ATA adapter card, system boot-up has slowed down. I
tried disabling the onboard IDE controller but to no availe. The
boot-up process pauses after "PNP Init Complete" is displayed. Presently
a hd and a CDROM drive are attached to the ATA adapter card and there is
no other divice attached to the onboard IDE.
Please help.

Kaz Honjo
 
Hi, Honjo.

My computer is like that, too. It boots from a SCSI drive and has two IDE
drives connected to the onboard HighPoint RAID controller (although I'm not
using any form of RAID). When it boots, it first takes several seconds to
detect the Adaptec SCSI host adapter and load its BIOS, then some more
seconds to find the SCSI HD. Then it loads the HighPoint BIOS and takes
several more seconds to detect the two IDE drives. Then it detects my
CD/DVD drives and starts loading Windows. All told, it takes about two
minutes before it ever begins to load WinXP.

All this, of course, is not WinXP's fault, and no amount of tweaking WinXP
is going to speed up this part of the boot process. You may have a similar
problem. To get a really fast boot time, you and I will have to reconfigure
our systems to boot from the standard IDE controllers. Or just live with
the slow boot time to gain the other benefits of the faster controllers.

RC
 
Hi, R. C. White:

Thank you for your response.
My problem was not "several seconds" as in your case but about thirty
seconds pause just before loading bios of the ATA card. Since no device
was attached to the onboard IDE controller I thought the problem could
be resolved by disabling it. Anyway, after experiments I found that
attaching the CDROM drive to the Primary Master of the onboard IDE
solved the probllem. The hard drive is left attached to the Primary
Master of the ATA card.

Kaz Honjo
 
Back
Top