Long pause during motherboard POST

[WSW]

My old HP socket 7 computer always pause for about 60 second during POST. This pause starts after BIOS initializes the mouse and before BIOS detects the hard disk. While it pause the Phoenix BIOS POST Code is 90h. After the long pause it would complete the POST correctly and boot into Windows 98 without problem.

What would be the cause of this long pause? How can I fix it?

[Panama Red]

About the only way I know of to speed up the post is to check the bios for a "quick post" or similarly named feature and make sure it is enabled.

[Cricket]

Try disconnecting any optical drive you have in that computer (CD, DVD, etc...) and see if it'll boot up faster. I've seen bad optical drives stall the boot up on a computer.

Cricket

[Blakhart]

Also you might try to set the drive parameters yourself so the bios doesn't bother checking them. Be carefull that you are accurate in your settings or you may make it worse than before. Just use the settings that bios reports for the drive(s) as what you are to manualy enter.

[Panama Red]

Just thought of another slowdown in posting. If your Antivirus is set to scan the boot sector before each start, that too will slow things down.

[WSW]

I disconnected the CD drive and it still pause at HD check.

Finally I removed the existing WD HD and switched to a Matrox HD. The pause went away.

There might be something wrong with my WD disk. I'll do a diagnostic on this disk.

[Panama Red]

Thanx for posting back. Keep us informed of the final outcome.

[glc]

The WD may not be jumpered correctly. If you are not using cable select, you have to remove the jumper if the drive is standalone on the cable with no slave attached, the "master" position is only for when a slave exists.