Bios taking forever to detect IDE drives

[Wratchet]

For some reason after transferring the contents of my PC to a new case (Antec Sonata), I now have to wait at least 45 seconds for my bios to detect my IDE drives! Now the obvious factor here is the cables are bad, but I can still do everything on both HDs just fine in windows and there doesn't appear to be any sort of slow-down. I have 4 IDE drives in my system: 1 80 GB Maxtor, 1 120 GB Maxtor, 1 LG DVD burner and 1 Liteon CDRW. The HDs are on primary IDE 1 and the optical drives are on IDE 2. Before I transfered my system my drives were detected just fine, without the wait. This is my system:

Antec Sonota with 380 Watt True Power, power supply
P4 3.2E @ 3.6
2x512 MB Ram
Radeon 9800 Pro
Asus P4P800 motherboard
Echo Mia soundcard
XP-120 HSF with 120mm Panflow

I really did have to kinda bend the cables in ackward ways to make them fit, but I still don't understand how if the cables were broken the drives would function or be detected. I have set the drives up with 32bit access enabled in the bios and I also have selected UDMA 5 for both HDs as that is what the bios seems to detect them as.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

[Wizard]

The only thing I can think of is that one of the cables is not quite in correctly.
It is taking ages on just the both IDE channels or just the one with your HDs on.??

[Wratchet]

Its taking ages to detect all onboard IDE, HDs and optical drives. I was checking out Maxtor's website and they claim that all cable-select capable drives should be set to cable select! Huh? Since when do we not set Master and Slave on our HDs? I think I have one drive set to Master and on set to cable select. I wonder if that is the problem although it never was a problem in the past.

[TLS2000]

Never mix your jumper settings up. If you have one drive set as Master or Slave, set the other one for the opposite, and not cable select. If you choose to use cable select, set all drives to cable select.

[Wratchet]

Ok, so I've set the jumpers on both my drives to Master and Slave respectively, I've also replaced the IDE cable to the HDs. So far I have not replaced the cable to the optical drives. This morning on boot-up it took 30 seconds or so for the bios to recognize my IDE drives! Ahhh! I am getting worried, what is going on? Maybe I'll replace the cable to the optical drives next but I really don't think there is anything wrong with it.

Does anyone else have any experience with this sort of thing? What could it be? Is one of my HDs on its way out? I have set my bios back to "auto" in the DMA settings just in case but I still have this problem.

Please help.

Thanks

[Ice Czar]

a few other things
1. make sure the drive isnt jumpered to single (master with no slave) if there is one
2. set the first boot device as HDD 0 or 1 (depends whichever is the lowest) , in the BIOS boot order
and place that drive as the master on the primary IDE Channel its the first scanned
3. In the BIOS if available > Force ESCD (some are automatic)
while technically for PNP devices it forces the BIOS to refresh all the config data including the drive locations
(Extended System Configuration Data)
4. always have any Master at the end of the cable, never have a slave without a master

[evilmicah]

FWIW - I know on WD HD's that there is an undocumented (or at least rarely documented) jumper setting which remedies this problem.

::;;:

Look above and put the jumper there on WD's drives that are having this problem. It's the proper setting for a single drive. I've been told this by support at WD, and when I asked a friend of mine who owns a local computer store he said he knew about it.

All I konw, is I've been doing it on my drives and haven't had a problem.

So, maybe you wanna try calling the manufacturer?

[Wratchet]

Well thanks a lot guys!

Ice Czar, I'm going to try what you said. I'll keep you guys posted.