Boot Up Delay

[superflybribri]

Hello,

I went to the store and bought a new hard drive and have backed up all of my important data. I had read something in the Western Digital documentation saying that if I ran their diagnostic utility software and passed on all tests then it might not be a bad sector and actually a virus that caused my files to become corrupt. I don't know if this is the said problem that I was having before. I use Norton Internet Securities 2005 Anti Spyware Edition. I ran it before and there showed no viruses at all. So I installed the new hard drive and it works but it seems to have brought a new problem with it. The hard drive that I bought was a Western Digital Caviar SE 320 GB. I got it up and running but everytime that I boot up my computer, between the part where it shows the Windows XP logo loading and then the Welcome screen, there is a black screen on the monitor for around one minute. This only started occuring with this new hard drive. It takes so long for the black screen to go through that the second monitor that I use went into energy saver. I have never heard of such a problem so if anyone knows what this might be caused by could you please let me know. Thank you very much for all of your help so far.

-Brian

 

[sturm]

are you booting off the new drive or off the old drive?
If booting off the new drive, try booting without the other drive hooked up, if it is hooked up.
If booting of the old drive and new drive is hooked up also, are jumpers set if using ata drives?
Try booting with just the old drive in by itself.
Also remember that WD drives dont use a jumper if only one drive is installed.
Was this a clean install on the new drive? (if booting off new)

 

[superflybribri]

This is how it worked. I have a 30 GB hard drive that is my main drive for booting off of and for running all my software from. I used to have a 120 GB hard drive that was just for storing files. That is the one that went bad. I backed up all of the information that I had on it. I bought a new 320 GB hard drive last week and only put the backed up files that I had from before on it. Even before I put any files on the hard drive, it was taking a while for the comptuer to boot up. This is not a problem that I ever had before. The jumpers on both hard drives are set to be cable select and are wired in that manner. I have booted from just the 30 GB hard drive in the past with no problems but I will try to remove the 320 GB drive and see if that is still the case now. I would assume that it would be. Thank you for your information so far. Message me if you have any more questions.

 

[superflybribri]

I just thought that I would update everyone on the problem just in case this does arise with someone else. So I called Western Digital today and went through a couple different lines of customer service. We finally got to a setup now where the computer boots up normally. What needed to be done was that the two hard drives used to be on one single IDE cable to the motherboard and this needed to be switched so that they were on different IDE cables. The guy said that it might have been a timing problem between the two hard drives or something. He didn't really give me an answer. Well now that I did that I was moving around the cables so that I could attach all of my hardware again. But now that I moved the IDE cable from my DVD Burner to my second hard drive, the cable does not reach back to the DVD burner. At first I didn't think that this would be a problem at all because I have a million of these spare IDE ribbon cables laying around. Well it turns out that all of these things are the same size and none of them reach both of them. Plus somewhere along the line from one to the other, I have to pull a 360 manuever to get them all in. So now I have no DVD burner for the moment and have to wait till I can go to the store and get a new cable that makes the reach. But other than that it seems to be working just fine. Thanks everyone for the help that I did receive.

 

[pscowboy]

Try putting both harddrives back on "Primary" connection. But don't use cable select, (sometimes it doesn't work properly). MAKE SURE you have an 80 wire IDE cable with a blue end. Jumper your 30g drive as Master and plug the non-blue end in. Jumper your storage drive as Slave and plug it with the middle connector. You will have to read the top of the drives for info on the jumpering. Now plug the blue end into the mobo Primary. There almost always is NO problem with two drives being on the Primary. Remember, red wire (#1) next to power connector on the drives.

With the DVD not attached, boot and see if both drives are recognized during POST. If they are, windows should boot okay. When you reach a quiet desktop, RESTART. This second boot should be normal (no one minute of black); and from then on. I am making the assumption that you have SP2 installed. Otherwise XP will only recognize about 137g or so on the new drive. If you didn't have SP2, that may have been the reason for the delay. Does XP show all the capacity?

If all this is okay, hook up your DVD as MASTER (not cable select) to the SECONDARY IDE connection. You can use a 40 wire for this. Just be sure you use the two ends for plugging in.

 

[superflybribri]

When I talked to the technical support over at Western Digital they had walked me through a couple stages of troubleshooting. One of the first stages was to change the hard drives away from cable select and put them on as master and slave. This unfortunately did not work on the primary IDE cable. Unfortunately I do not know what the difference between a 80 wire cable and a 40 wire cable is. I am not even sure which one I have. All I know is that I have a couple of them. The ones that I am using are both the ones that came with the motherboard which is an Asus A8V Deluxe. There are ones that came with the hard drive as well as ones that I have collected over the years. Unfortunately for me, none of these were long enough to make the route from the hard drive to the DVD burner and then back to the motherboard. As far as the remarks with Windows, I am using Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed. All of my Windows files are up to date seeing as I had to reformat when I made my last upgrade a couple of months ago.

 

[pscowboy]

The WD techie was blowing smoke. You can mix different hd's on the same IDE cable when you're not RAIDing them. The bootup process is only using the first one. Timing is not an issue.

Let's not give up on this yet. An 80 wire "ribbon" cable is flat, about two inches across, and has 80 lines running parallel (you can count them; when you reach 40, you'll be half way - STOP - the test is over). Almost always, one end is blue. You absolutely must have this with todays' drives.

Making the assumption that both drives are okay, BE ABSOLUTELY SURE about the jumpers. Read the tops of both hd's. Some Master settings vary. Some are Master alone (one drive only); some have a setting for Master WITH Slave (this could be no jumper at all). If your boot drive has only one position described for Master, put the jumper there. Jumper your WD for Slave and carefully connect as per my post above.

The drives are screwed in place, jumpered and connected - let's boot (leave your box open). Go into the BIOS (Del key, or F1 or F2) and arrow between pages looking for a reference to "IDE Configuration". Inside that, you will see Primary IDE Master and IDE Slave (and Secondary IDE) listings. Both drives should show up here. They will also be on the "Boot" page in the hard drives section. This will be the proof that they are hooked up all right. If this isn't so, change the cable and try this again.

We have known good hd's, known good cable, jumpered and connected right, BIOS is reading them, an uncorrupted Operating System - THIS WILL BOOT! We know your video and ram are okay because you booted sucessfully with these drives separated. They are a non-issue. I'm hoping you're okay booting up. If so, connect your DVD to Secondary as Master.

If you still can't boot under that scenario, I'm stumped and I yield to a higher power. I've assembled & repaired thousands of boxes, and have never failed to power up to a desktop with the above true.

If you have to go back to the drives being separated, you can purchase a 24" IDE cable to reach from your WD to your DVD (God forgive). Carefully connect as per my previous post. Good luck!