Boot Delay problem with S-ATA and U-DMA disks

[Dean Ayres]

Hi
I recently bought a new motherboard and a serial ATA hard disk. I already
had a UDMA disk, and planned to use both. When I boot the machine, the BIOS
screens are displayed, then the screen goes black for about a minute, after
which normal boot resumes.

Any idea what the problem might be?

Here is some more detail;

The motherboard is a Gigabyte 8IG-1000Pro , which supports SATA and UDMA
disks together.
As my new SATA disk is faster, I'm using that as a boot disk. However the
old UDMA disk is enumerated first, so I have the following partitions

c: UDMA system boot files
d: SATA Windows partitions

....and several other partitions.
Wakiking up after hibernation is also a slow process. The bar showing
progress moves *very* slowly.

Some specs;
Motherboard; Gigabyte 8IG1000 Pro
Processor; P4 2.6 HT, 800FSB
SATA Disk; DiamondMax Plus9 120GB SATA150
UDMA Disk; Can't recall. Somethinmg 3 years old.

Thanks a lot,

Dean Ayres

 

[Bob Harris]

Given the motherboard and CPU, I would also have expected a fast startup.

Have you checked with Gigabyte for the latest SATA drivers and the latest
IDE drivers?

Also, is there an option for a "quiet" boot and do you have that active? In
a quiet boot you do not see what is being checked, but it is still being
checked, and might be displaying a blank screen. Try disabling the quiet
boot option to hopefully see what is taking the time. A complete RAM check
can take a while, but that usually comes before the enumeration of disks in
the POST.

Is the UDMA disk being treated as DMA or PIO. The latter is much slower.
This is more likely a question to ask within windows rather than at the BIOS
level. To check, us ethe device manager, IDE ATA/AAPI controllers, pick a
controller, right-click properties, advanced settings tab, look for "DMA if
available". If the hard drive is set to PIO, try to chnage it to "DMA if
available". If already DMA, note the current transfer mode. UDMA should be
mode 5 or 6 (I think).

Finally, if you really wanted to make the SATA drive C:\, it probably could
be done by unplugging the UDMA drive, FDISKing the SATA drive (or equivalent
from XP CDROM recovery console), then clean installing XP on the SATA disk.
Once XP recognizes the SATA disk as C:\, if you add the UDMA disk, it should
be recognized as D:\. However, that will make the XP designation of disks
different than the DOS designation. If the disks are NTFS, that won't much
matter, since few DOS-based programs will be able to operate on them. Just
be careful when using backup programs like GHOST or True Image, since they
may default to the DOS order. The safest thing to do is assign unique
lables ot the disks within XP, so that they can easily be distinguished. Of
course, if they are different sizes, that would work too.

Finally, do not erase the BOOT.INI and associated couple of files that XP
placed on C:\, unless you plan on a complete re-install. Those files must
be on the first partition of the first disk, no matter where XP is located.

As for hibernation, I have had poor luck with that under XP. Speed was not
the issue, but too often I would get a blue screen of death when waking.
So, I gave up on hibernation and saved the equivalent disk space of my RAM
(1 Gig).