Gigabyte GA MA74GM S2H woes

I have just set up a system with the above board as the base

2gb RAM (2x1gb)
AMD processor
GeForce 8400GS 512MB DDR2 HDMI/DVI PCI-Express card
IDE DVD writer
IDE 80gb Hard drive
On board sound
Windows XP
Norton Internet security 2008
All drivers installed as per designers guidelines

I have a problem with the system booting. It takes upwards of 25 seconds to detect the IDE drives then a further 20 odd seconds to verify the DMI pool. Furthermore 1 boot in 3 it will ask for a system disc to boot from -even with the boot device set to hard drive only. It will then sit for another 15 to 20 seconds before continuing to boot (without a system disc being used).

All then works well, fast clean no problems.

System shuts down within 8 seconds.

Can anyone plesse offer me some help as to what is going wrong please ?

Jim

Yeah - SATA drives are getting so ridiculously cheap, it hardly makes sense to do any troubleshooting past just replacing it. I have had a similar s'ware problem, though, and for the life of me I can't imagine the cause - both my Win7β systems (x86 AND x64) recently 'de-stabilized' and started giving me disk service related crashes - ahh, it is beta, and not too unexpected, but the oddity is this: when they crash, sometimes the RAID BIOS' discovery process, and the rest of the boot process slows down to a crawl, and will stay that way through any number of reboots, even to, say, Vistax64 or 86; until I power off the machine, the BIOS acts 'infected' - oddest D thing I've seen in a while...

Did you check your master/slave settings on the drives? Sounds like a possible candidate for your symptoms. Instead of setting the jumpers on each device to CS or cable select, try setting your hard disk to master and your cd/dvd to slave, and see if that alleviates your issues.