• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Slower boot with SATA than IDE

D

Dallows

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 18, 2004
Messages
6,816
So my topic is a little misleading. I used to have IDE hdds before my main drive started freaking out. So I popped in a SATA drive (I think the 3.0gb/s one or whatever) and now my boot time is like 2 minutes. I suspect this is because of the sata and ide combo. Any input is appreciated. Thanks.
 
Open Device Manager and check the hard drive controllers to see which controller is running the drive.
You should see mention of DMA there, it should be enabled and using DMA.
You can also perform a quick speed test while in there.

Make sure DMA is allowed for the drive in your CMOS.
 
Ultra DMA is on. The IDE drive is in the master IDE btw, even though it's the secondary drive.

I'm gonna check for updated drivers and stuff too.

Read out of speed test

Transfer mode is Serial ATA Generation 2-3G
Write caching is enabled

Theoretical limit - 300.0
Burst speed - 139.3
Sustained speed - 60.5

Also. on my motherboard, asus a8n-e, there are two seperate SATA modes, SATA and SATA2. I was on SATA and then switched to SATA2 with no boot-speed difference.
 
The drives speed is fine, something else must be slowing the boot process.
At what point does it appear to go slow?
 
right from the get go.
Post bios info
detecting IDE drives pops up
another.... 30secs to a minute until the actual drives show up
umm... another minute or so then it moves on to the next screen with all the other info (drives DMA, IRQs, etc)... another minute or so and it goes to windows loading screen

My main hdd is actually the E: now, while my backup is C:

that couldn't be doing it right?
 
I've had a similar experience on my old NForce 3 board.
There were 2 SATA controllers, plugging a drive onto the second (RAID) controller made my drive detection really long.
It doesnt happen on my current A8N-E though.
Can you try using a different SATA port and cable?
For the hell of it use a different power connector as well.

If you get really stuck, have you thought about trying a different BIOS, I'm on quite an old one in case that helps.
I wont know the version until I reboot.

edit:
about the drive letters messing up, when you install windows its a good idea to unplug all other drives.
If another drive is already drive C:, it usually assigns another drive letter to the drive you are installing to. This can get really messy.
I once installed XP with another XP drive present and it ended up using both Windows folders for the new installation.
The new install wouldnt boot unless the other drive was plugged in!
The only solution was to start from scratch.
 
hmm. so far I've tried sata ports 1 and 3, I could try 2 and 4. I'll have to wait till my game finishes installing though. umm. I kinda thought all sata cables were the same, but who knows, could be faulty? I could also try unplugging the ide drive too. hmm. some more troubleshooting I will do. thanks.
 
can you try turning autodetect off in the BIOS for ATA/SATA connections where there is no drive.

it should say "none" rather than "auto"
except where your drives are actually listed.

or else it tries to detect a hard drive on every port every time you boot up.
 
okay, I'll try that too. Also Chernobyl1, I'm definitely gonna have to reinstall windows to get the drives right. I just tried to unplug the backup drive and it wouldn't go into windows. it booted faster, but asked for a boot disk. :(
 
yeah, that sucked. I'm just gonna reinstall windows correctly this time and go from there. easier to troubleshoot. thanks for the help though.
 
I haven't read the full thread, but my friend had a problem where his SATA drive took forever to boot. We realized that apparently his BIOS was detecting his printer as a removeable drive. We turned off the printer, and boom, boots into windows in 20-30 seconds
 
I appreciate your input, but I have no printer connected. And I've made it so the bios should only see the connected drives.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top