Slow Start

Ok a few things to get out of the way first. It's not a virus, it's not ram, or processor. I've changed or checked all of those things.

Now what its doing: On boot up, it goes through the bios fine, and when it goes to the hard drive it waits for almost 2 minutes. Then boots normaly, and runs fine. For Two minutes there is nothing on the screen. Any Ideas ? It's a fresh install of Windows 2k, the processor is only running at 650mhz, and it is an 866, so a bios upgrade could be in store, could that be the problem?

The board is a PCchips
Quantum Hd

 

Seems like a broken driver or something, try to boot in secure mode?

 

Try setting fail safe defaults in the BIOS.

It may also be that that your drives are running in PIO mode, so check that in the BIOS. It should be running in UDMA mode. Also check the device manager. Goto start>run>type devmgmt.msc>IDE ATA controllers>right click primary and secondary IDE channel>advanced settings tab and make sure it is set to DMA if available.

One more thing, PC Chips isn't known to make quality motherboards, and quantum is an old manufacturer of hard drives and I don't recall hearing anything good about them either, so consider replacing them.

 

The mobo, has to stay with the system, This is a tiny pc, I may try swaping out the drive, to check my times. I have all pio umda set to auto. It's not a bad driver, it stops before it even boots windows. When I was installing it Detecting hardware took the same amount of time before the blue screen came up.

 

Check that your jumpers are set correctly. Check that you don't have a CD or floppy in the tray. Make sure the boot order is correct in the BIOS. Goto start>run>type compmgmt.msc>disk management check that your boot drive is active. It will say "(boot)" underneath the disk label.

If that doesn't work try BootVis to determine what exactly is causing the hang up. After installing and opening the application, goto trace>next boot + driver delays. It will reboot your system then upon windows booting you will see some graphs.

 

I useually preface my posts with a statement that says I am not a noob, and have tried all the simple things, but I was lazy this time.

Here is the odd part, When booting to emergency disk a full linux version of ubcd, IT snaps right up. I quit for the evening but tomorrow I'll be flashing the bios that I spent two hours tracking down. That will take care of my processor speed problem, and maybe if I'm lucky this hanging <u>Before</u> windows starts.