Re: Slow booting harddrive

In alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt george41407@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

I have an 8 gig harddrive that I connected as Master to my second IDE
cable. This is then the 3rd drive on my system. I installed that
drive to be a backup and only used temporarily. I unplugged my CD
drive to avoid conflicts.

When I boot up, the computer hangs for well over a minute when it gets
to that drive. Then it finally boots. The drive checks out fine when
I scandisk it, and it works fine once I'm booted. The drive contains
SMART on it, and it says "disabled", which I have disabled in Bios.
Bur enabling it does not prevent the slow booting.

For the heck of it, I took a 40 gig drive which FDISK only allows me
to format to 8 gigs (Windows 98se). I placed that drive on the same
cable and it boots right up without any hanging.

FDISK should have no problems handling up to 64 gigabytes.
Perhaps you have an older/out-of-date version:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/263044

Both are set as MASTER since they are the only drive on that IDE
cable.

Anyone have any idea why this happens?

(I did re-FDISK and re-format it on this same computer).

Try using a later version of FDISK.

The computer is a PIII 700mhz homebuilt, with 320megs ram and an Intel
CPU. The AMI bios is dated 1999.

This drive is a Western Digital Caviar 28400
Model - AC28400-00RT

One other thing I should mention is that this slowness is booting into
DOS (which I believe is called post-boot or something like that. This
is not Windows 98 causing the problem. I always boot to dos because I
run a dos database for my address/phone number list, and often boot to
dos to retrieve a phone number. When I want to start windows, I just
type win. The computer reads the amount of memory, then reads my
regular hard drives without problem. When it gets to this 3rd drive,
it hangs and hangs, and the rest of the booting (to dos) is slow.
Once loaded, both dos and windows works fine.

You might try Spinrite, if you can get a copy.
The reason DOS and Windows work fine, is that you (obviously) aren't
accessing that drive for much in the way of files.

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