super fast boot up?

What was the problem with the HD you replaced? Maybe this had something to do with it.

The problem was i installed a start up screen and windows wouldnt start lol should have known  . Both hard disks are same spec and ive swapped them over every few months to keep things fast and used the other as second backup just incase something goes wrong. Both are udma 100, 7200 and 8.5ms. Normally boots windows in about 40 secs but almost as soon as i left the hs detection screen i was at windows....

Quite a mistery eh? If i get some time over the weekend ill set it up again and benchmark it etc to see whats going on, and post the results, but i just got a new job so might not have time.
Thanks for the reply!

Are you sure that both are configured at the same ATA rating? For example is one set at ATA33 and the other at ATA100. Did you use the same IDE cable for both drives? Are they both set to Master or Cable Select?

one was set to master and the other slave, but the performance of the drives are identical to eachother when both on their own as master. And yeah they were sharing the same ide cable.

Did you change their positions on the ide cable when you switched from slave to master?

The main drive was runnin on its own as master, when i put the other h/d in i set it to master and put the main drive to slave like normal.

The only things I can come up with are the following:

1. Originaly you had lose connection causing some errors
2. You changed something your not remembering
3. Cable routed differently (interfernce from some other component) unlikly
4. HD just a bad HD
5. Act of Computer Gods - My Pick

yeah... sure that both are ata100 and udma enabled? the backup drive could also be well optimised. boot times increase with fragmentation, registry size and complexity, # of installed programs etc.

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