Slow Boot

[MSIuser]

There are hardware and Win 98 problems I'm having. I have just purchased a new WD 80gig (the special edition 8mb cache) hd. When I set it to master and try to post it sits at the post screen for ages before showing the drives connected. This only happens with this drive and not my IBM Deskstar 40gig drive. Any ideas?

MY other problem is that when I have Win 98 installed it also spends ages at a flashing white dash screen for a while before showing the Win 98 logo. You got any ideas what's going on?

Thanks
David

[morriswindgate]

Do you have it jumpered correctly? Western Digital has seperate settings when using their hard drives as a single installation and another when you are using it in multiple drive setups.

http://support.wdc.com//techinfo/general/jumpers.asp

[MSIuser]

I think so! Will have a little check tho!

[Web Gecko]

Howdy MSIuser

I have seen drives hang at the POST like that. Generally you may have a loose IDE cable i.e. not seated firmly in the drives' IDE socket. A loose cable could cause intermittent status between the drive and mobo IDE controller i.e. I'm here, no I'm not, yes I am. A friend had an old 486 system and drive where the IDE cable connector/drive IDE socket was a loose fit.

All I could do was reseat the connector and this made the boot work normally. Jumpering on your drive is the other possibility.

As to Win 98 boot time from power down to a fully loaded desktop, Win Me boots to a fully loaded desktop in 45 to 60 seconds depending on what is scheduled to run at startup.
I found what you did with Win 98 SE, it took over 2 minutes
to boot from power down to a fully loaded desktop.

You poweron, POST, then you get your Win 98 logo which blanks to the flashing cursor (stays here for eons) and then at last you get some activity and go into your desktop. I have seen this on other machines running Win 98. I think it's down to the Win startup software (maybe). Me seems to be quicker on startup
(improved software maybe). I don't know how to fix this either.
Maybe there is some info on MSs web site ?

Hope this helps.

cheers

The Web Gecko

[MSIuser]

Things are sorted! Feel a little stupid now! I jumped to the forum (not a bad thing) and posted a question about something without trying the things I knew I should have! All I had to do was try out the CS setting! Now things are working no problem!

Thanks for the help anyway!
David