Hey gang,

I recently installed a WD 500GB EIDE drive in this system (my FE box) and noticed that it takes a long time to recognize the IDE drives....and boot up.

Is anyone else having this issue, too?

I previously has an old 40GB drive in it, but I could tell that the bearing was starting to go. It would boot almost instantly with that drive installed.

BTW: BIOS version: 0705
There's newer versions out, but it only mentions about new CPU support. Would updating the BIOS help? Any tricks to update the BIOS w/o Windows?

UPDATE 09/28/2007:

READ those HD specifications VERY Carefully! What was causing my problem is that the 500GB WD drive has a jumper setting for 'master,' BUT that is a 'master' setting IF it has an attached slave device, too. When I bought the drive, it was jumpered for Cable Select, so I moved it to the Master setting.

Since the HD was the only device on the IDE cable, the drive was still looking for the slave unit, therefore slowing down the boot process. The MoBo settings were NOT the problem. BY default, if there's only the one HD and no slave, it should not be jumpered at all!

Hopefully this may help someone else out in the future!

Check the boot order in your BIOS. At a guess it's looking at a bunch of other devices first. You may also want to disable any legacy devices you're not using like game controller ports, parallel ports, ...

No, HD is setup as first boot device. I change it to CD only when updating.

Edit: No 'unused ports' (serial, parallel) are enabled. I keep my systems pretty streamlined in terms of potential resource usage.

Is it scanning a bunch of SATA ports or something?

tjc:

Nothing is different in the BIOS settings from the 40GB drive to the 500GB drive.

I've noticed that with the 500GB drive, it takes about an additional 40-50 seconds to determine the ATA devices, then boot.

I even tried putting the 40 GB drive back in the system, and it boots with no delay at all.

Go Figure.

Are you using the same IDE cables? Are the drives jumpered the same?

Maybe this is what TJC was getting at, but is the old drive old enough that it runs proper on a 40 pin IDE cable, and the new drive requires an 80 pin IDE cable?

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Currently Running:
Too lazy to update this with my current hardware, I'll redo it during my next install =)

Yes. That and a possible CS/MA/SL mismatch.

The cable is an 80 lead, with both drives set as Master. The DVD burner is connected to the secondary IDE interface as Master, so no interference there, either.

What brand are the two HDs? I've run into issues with Western Digital drives being set as master when there is no slave present. I've not noticed slow boots, but I have had situations where the mobo won't even recognize that the drive is present unless I either set it to CS or add another device as a slave.

I'd suggest setting it to CS, or moving the Optical drive from Master Secondary IDE to Slave Primary IDE and see if that makes any difference.

_________________
Currently Running:
Too lazy to update this with my current hardware, I'll redo it during my next install =)

I've had the same issues as rando before, sometimes there's jumper settings for Master, master (with slave) & master (without slave)

You can't set both drives on the same cable as MA!

Search for a thread by me that covers the preferred ways to hook up an IDE drive. Ah, here it is, ASCII art and everything...
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7577&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=ide&start=18

No. They are on separate cables. HD is master on IDE 1 and DVD burner is master on IDE 2.

I did that thinking that (maybe) I may add another drive and create a LV for more storage space. I've always kept optical drives on the secondary IDE port, just to keep the I/O bottlenecks down.

Have you set the BIOS to have already detected the drives rather than scan on boot up?
On removing the second drive (when powered down, of course ), does it boot up at the original speed?

Bruce S.

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Updated 2019/10/26: AthlonII X2 265 Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P
16Gb PC 1866 DDR3, 500GB+2TB+4TB SATA HDD,
SATA DVD-RW Asus DRW-24D5MT , NVIDIA GeForce GT1080
Hauppauage Nova-T 500, Nova-T LinHes R8.6.1

Can't offer any specific help I'm afraid (I'm here to try and understand how to resolve my own problems ) but I'm using the same motherboard, and a 500GB Seagate IDE drive without any problems.

The HDD is primary master (using cable select IIRC), and the optical is secondary master. The BIOS is the latest I think...

Is the issue that the HDD isn't powering up fast enough? How quickly is it detected on a warm boot, rather than a cold start? There used to be an issue with Western Digital drives back in my Amiga days (so likely to be old tech 80MB drives!) where the drive took so long to spin up to speed that the Amiga gave up polling the IDE port and decided that there wasn't a drive connected