System suddenly takes ages to boot ! Need Help !

[_BRI_]

Hi you guys... I'm a real amateur here so i'd appreciate your help. I decided to build a budget system on my own.
I bought a AMD athlon ii 245+ asus m4a78-em + kingston ddr2 800 2/2gb + hdd wd 500gb sata 7200rpm.

The hdd was not available at the time I made the purchase so I built the system with 2 old pata hdd's. A wd 200gb and a samsung 30gb. As ide master and slave I installed winxp sp3 and everyting was doing fine.

Today the new hdd was delivered to me by mail and so I decided to get the samsung 30hdd out of the system because it was making funny noises and I guess its about to crack. So I would leave the pata 200gb alone and the new sata 500gb.

But after removing that hdd the system suddenly takes ages to boot. I already cleared cmos suspecting a problem there. But it did not solve anything.

Can you guys help me I don't have a clue of what could be going on!

 

[tecmo34]

Which one is your boot drive? The new Sata or the old Pata? Also, what was the 30GB hard drive before you removed it. Did you reset your boot sequence after clearing the CMOS because it could be trying to boot first off the one that doesn't have the OS.

 

[_BRI_]

The first drive the master pata 200gb has the os (winxp sp3), I added the second one with an old winxp sp2 in it. I formatted that drive and when I noticed it was making funny noises I removed the drive. Later on after clearing cmos and resetting the boot sequence the system does not read the hdd for a while (about a minute) and then it goes on... I am suspecting it is a bios problem?
I did not plugged in the new sata drive because I am afraid I could get this even worse...

 

[tecmo34]

Two recommendations...

First... Try taking the pata 200GB off of Master setting and placing it on Normal and see what it does. Having the hard drive pins in Master may be causing it to slow down since there is no slave drive... Maybe??

Second... I would do a clean install with the SATA hard drive and disconnect the PATA and see if that speeds things up.

I don't see who the BIOS would be the issue since you were running fine with two.

 

[_BRI_]

Thank you very much !!!

I switched the hdd pins from master to cable select and everything is lightning fast once again it boots up in a few seconds!

Thanks again.

solved

 

[tecmo34]

You are welcome!

If you want the thread to show [SOLVED], just click on a best answer on one of the post to have it solved.

 

[False_Dmitry_II]

I know I'm gonna get -1 for this but...

He had the OS drive as slave?!?!

But, listen, _BRI_ you don't want to leave your system as it is now. You will see a speed increase if you can boot off of the SATA drive. You should (with whatever method you know how, I generally just use GParted) just move the current install to the new hard drive. Of course, you should install the SATA/RAID drivers for your motherboard first so that windows doesn't have a problem booting. (and yeah, I've done that before to step around no floppy drive and the drivers were so bad I couldn't slipstream the XP disc) You can use both of the other ones as pure storage after that. On the smaller one I'd only put loseable stuff on it. I did that with a 20 gig for a while. Then I ran it as a system drive for a linux HTPC and it lasted quite a while before it finally failed. SMART even warned of it about to fail within a month of it going down.

 

[_BRI_]

I know I'm gonna get -1 for this but...

He had the OS drive as slave?!?!

But, listen, _BRI_ you don't want to leave your system as it is now. You will see a speed increase if you can boot off of the SATA drive. You should (with whatever method you know how, I generally just use GParted) just move the current install to the new hard drive. Of course, you should install the SATA/RAID drivers for your motherboard first so that windows doesn't have a problem booting. (and yeah, I've done that before to step around no floppy drive and the drivers were so bad I couldn't slipstream the XP disc) You can use both of the other ones as pure storage after that. On the smaller one I'd only put loseable stuff on it. I did that with a 20 gig for a while. Then I ran it as a system drive for a linux HTPC and it lasted quite a while before it finally failed. SMART even warned of it about to fail within a month of it going down.

Well thanks !!

I want to do add more hdd's in the future the problem is I already reached my budget (800usd prices are a bit high here in Argentina) and I want to learn some basic video editing stuff so I think it would be better if I leave the new sata drive for media storage/scratch disk and in a few weeks I add on another sata drive. Because you usually deal with 3 video streams and 3 audio streams in a single project, I have read the hd video streams are about 23mb/sec so I am guessing the pata drive will fall behind because my system's hdd benchmark shows a performance of 60mb/sec .
So thanks for the tip about Gparted I was already looking for a realiable way to move the os. I'll try that next.
The third drive, the 30gb samsung... I think I'll dispose that drive it's making loud mechanical noises... I already have had bad experiencies with samsung, seagate and maxtor. I don't trust them anymore, WD seems to be slower but all around more sturdy and reliable.

 

[False_Dmitry_II]

The only problem with GParted is that it's really supposed to just be a partition editor. But it also lets you copy paste entire partitions, so that's why that works. You then need to get a bootsector somehow. I typically just put in the XP disc and "repair" the "missing" stuff. Or for linux just reinstalling GRUB with a liveCD.

You could also use something like acronis to ghost. I've not used it but it sounds pretty good cause I keep hearing of it. I've never really researched ghosting tools.

Edit: oh and that number is for playback of high bitrate 1080p stuff. Like a blu-ray image. If you actually used as many streams as you said even a really fast normal SATA is just over 100, which is still too slow for real-time stuff like that anyway. Normally that doesn't go at real-time anyway since the CPU has to do something to it. As far as trying to eliminate bottlenecks goes it might be better to simply use different hard drives for different things. Like after you get the next SATA and put the OS on it, you could use the 200 gig PATA for audio, and the other SATA that you have now for video streams. Maybe even combine them onto the OS drive. Something along those lines, because then they just work in tandem.