Boot time doubles! Basic yet frustrating a bit...

swimtech · Mar 26, 2009, 10:11 PM

Hey all,

Posting 'cause I found the reason why my posted system at left took twice as long to boot after adding a hard drive. No raid at all, just straight SATA drives with the original boot drive sectioned to two partitions.

On this particular board, may happen on many others though, the drives need to be attached to the mainboard SATA ports in order - beginning with the first - no open ports between existing drives.

I had added a hard drive to the last SATA onboard port for this board while ports numbered in the middle were already going to the eSATA header, and the first three ports were attached to the previously existing internal SATA drives. Immediately, my boot times to the Windows desktop more than doubled.

I didn't catch that right away though, for a couple days... I checked and double checked for changed bios settings, made sure chipset drivers were up to date, scanned multiple times for drive errors - all to no avail. I looked for documentation on this and didn't come across any. Then, it just dawned on me - moved the connnectors on the mainboard to fill from SATA 0 through 3 with the drives first, then attached the eSATA header (no drives attached externally though at present) lines to the last two ports (4 and 5). Voila! fixxy - fixed.

A lot of you folks have probably run into this, but I'd never heard of the issue - no experience like this myself before - and thought I'd post to share this quirk.

What dummy is his right mind would not have installed his drives to the ports in sequential order to begin with - me!

Oh, and my board doesn't like it when I change my overclock with my WD Mybook external attached to USB - it refuses to boot at anything but stock unless I undo it first. I can change my overclock - reboot to settle it in - then reattach. Another quirk worked around. Picky pick pick...

Judas · Mar 26, 2009, 11:35 PM

typically i setup my systems with the first port for hardrives, the rest are left open with the cd-rom drive as the last port.

I then go into the bios and set the unused ports as "None"

If another drive of any sort is added, i change that port back to auto again.

Mar 26, 2009, 10:11 PM	#1
swimtech HardwareHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: May 2002 Location: North Carolina Posts: 4,040 Rep Power: 124 System Specs	Boot time doubles! Basic yet frustrating a bit... Hey all, Posting 'cause I found the reason why my posted system at left took twice as long to boot after adding a hard drive. No raid at all, just straight SATA drives with the original boot drive sectioned to two partitions. On this particular board, may happen on many others though, the drives need to be attached to the mainboard SATA ports in order - beginning with the first - no open ports between existing drives. I had added a hard drive to the last SATA onboard port for this board while ports numbered in the middle were already going to the eSATA header, and the first three ports were attached to the previously existing internal SATA drives. Immediately, my boot times to the Windows desktop more than doubled. I didn't catch that right away though, for a couple days... I checked and double checked for changed bios settings, made sure chipset drivers were up to date, scanned multiple times for drive errors - all to no avail. I looked for documentation on this and didn't come across any. Then, it just dawned on me - moved the connnectors on the mainboard to fill from SATA 0 through 3 with the drives first, then attached the eSATA header (no drives attached externally though at present) lines to the last two ports (4 and 5). Voila! fixxy - fixed. A lot of you folks have probably run into this, but I'd never heard of the issue - no experience like this myself before - and thought I'd post to share this quirk. What dummy is his right mind would not have installed his drives to the ports in sequential order to begin with - me! Oh, and my board doesn't like it when I change my overclock with my WD Mybook external attached to USB - it refuses to boot at anything but stock unless I undo it first. I can change my overclock - reboot to settle it in - then reattach. Another quirk worked around. Picky pick pick... __________________ It's not so much getting your way that matters or not - what matters is how you go about getting it.