Strange issue: 20 seconds to POST on cold start?

[Niclo Iste]

I've only read the last page as I'm just passing through while I get my system back up and running from a disasterous failure of all hard drives.

Have you unhooked the CD Rom then booted from the hard drive and vice versa? If one of the drives are going bad the system may take extra time trying to read from them.

[Stifle]

I have tried removing all but the primary boot drive, which is brand new and has been checked for errors. There was no change..

[Niclo Iste]

Just for good measure unhook the new drive. New doesn't mean it isn't damaged. A bad drive could've passed QA orit even was damaged in shipping. It could be a bad circuit board on the drive and that will pass a scan of the physical sectors.

[pbolduc]

How about this: Take the video card out of the computer and inspect the capacitors on the video card. See if any are bulging or oozing. It may be as simple as recapping the video card. I've seen a few video cards with bad caps on them which produced similar results.

[Stifle]

Ill check the video card for bad caps, and then ill try using an older IDE drive from my 'Ancient of days' PC that ill have to reload windows on for this PC.
ill post the results in a few days.

[Stifle]

OK so it hwas been a few days but I finally managed to get another Hard drive in there and guess what happened... Using a 20Gb IDE hard drive I managed to cut down the pre-POST lag to about 6 second from around the 18 that is was before. SO this leads me to believe that either the brand new 750Gb WD hard drive that i just bought is faulty... or something is up with the SATA controller on this motherboard. I am going to try and boot my normal drive from all of the SATA ports on the motherboard individually and then ill report back

[slgrieb]

Thanks for keeping us updated. I've got to confess that this thread really has me hooked, and I can't wait to see where it goes. Still betting on UMW (Undetermined Motherboard Weirdness) by the way

[Stifle]

Hmm... More news to share

So I disconnected both my SATA drives (750Gb boot and 80Gb backup) in order to connect an old 20Gb IDE Hard drive. I hooked up the old one, loaded windows XP and then rebooted a few times - It seems to have made a big difference from 18 seconds of lag pre-post screen to about 6 seconds... this is all stated in my most previous post..

However something else has come up... Since I didn't feel like reloading this new XP with drivers etc.. I shut down after the reboot test i mentioned, disconnected the IDE Drive and then reconnected both my SATA drives. When i went to start up the PC with both SATA Drives in place (18 seconds to post screen again)... I get the error message, "Error Loading OS" at the end of post... I am not sure what that meant so I thought maybe i screwed up my boot order or something so I popped in the windows 7 CD and ran a start up fix and - It didnt detect any issues but it did fix it and I am now back in windows 7 on the SATA drive. But every time i shut down I have to use the windows 7 CD to get back to windows every time....


Blech, I changed the boot order of my hard drives after the re-installation of the SATA drives and that fixed the error loading OS problem.

[CCT]

Try this; http://peterkellner.net/2010/02/09/f...s7-bootloader/

[Stifle]

PROBLEM SOLVED!!!

So here is what made a difference, from 18 seconds down to 6 before reaching post screen, which is normal for this mobo i suppose.... Apparently more than half (4/6 tested) of the SATA ports on my mobo cause the PC to lag when the boot drive is connected through them. so i just switched from one port to another and finally when i checked it int he port that the SATA-DVD drive was using, Bingo, 5 seconds to post screen....

I think ill contact the manufacturer to have them send me a new mobo as this one seems defective.

Thanks everyone for your help with this problem, it turned out to be something more simple than I thought.

Later