Suddenly, loooooong bootup...

[QPGMRtc]

I recently got rid of a hard drive that was failing, and replaced it with an external Maxtor 150 GB. It ran beautifully, and boot-up speed was normal. Having one less drive, I noticed that I had an extra power splitter, and my power cable dist. was pretty messy. So I unplugged all power from my system, removed all splitters, and re-routed the power cables to look better. Everything is now plugged in, with only one splitter in use.

So now, my computer takes around two minutes to boot up...It sits at the XP screen (the one that proudly proclaims "Microsoft Windows XP..."), and the little blue bar goes into 'crawl' mode, but when it boots, there are no problems. All hardware works, and there are no warnings or errors in Event Viewer. HELP!

My system setup:
Windows XP Professional (legit)
K7S5A w/AMD 2400+ @ 2.2GHz (yes, I tried turning it back to 2.0 -- same thing)
300W generic power supply
2x512MB DIMM
BFG GeForce 5900XT
SoundBlaster Live! XGamer 5.1
Seagate 70GB IDE

 

[Phoenix86]

Check your IDE/SATA cables to the HDD. This is likely a HW issue, you had your hands in the system just before it failed...

 

[QPGMRtc]

IDE Cables connected tight and I even swapped each one out with a known-good spare. Same thing, looooooong bootup, no error messages in Event Viewer.

I have no doubt that this has something to do with the re-arranging of the power cables, but it just makes me wonder, what could cause this, and yet have a 100% working system, with no operating system awareness of the error?