Attn: Computer Gurus

[Scales]

Long story short, I installed a slave drive since my existing hard drive was too small for me. Ever since, my computer starts up EXTREMELY slow. Now I know it's about time for a reformat, but I was looking into something else as a possible fix. When I went into the setup screen to check the boot sequence, I noticed the defult was to boot my floppy first. What should be the proper order??? This is what I have...

IDE-HDD
ARMD-HDD
ARMD-FDD
ATAPI-CDROM
FLOPPY

I have no clue which is which, but I know it's a hell of a lot slower then it used to be and I figure if I can get things starting in the right order, it might help...

TIA

[animal]

It doesnt really matter what order they're in as long as it's booting it means it's finding the right drive. That's only the order it searches for bootable code first, if it doesn't find it, it goes on to the next. I suspect your speed issues are not related to boot order.

[Scales]

OK, whatcha thinkin then? I have a Dell Pentium III 800mhz, XP Pro, 512MB RAM. The factory HD is a 20G and I installed a Western Digital 7200 80G as the slave. I never had any speed issues until I installed the second drive. Now this poor thing is slower then dirt!!!

[animal]

well, you could unplug it and check if it fixes it again. Maybe the drive is misconfigured? Or even a bad drive?

[2kgtp]

I would remove unhook the WD drive. Also see if there is a BIOS update available from Dell. Personally I have had a lot of bad luck with WD drives. In fact, just removed an 80gb 8mb cache drive from my system. My box is now 3x as fast.

[Scales]

OK, so I'm trying to update my BIOS and I'm getting no where!!! Every file I DL from Dell just freezes... Can I get anything from the setup screen or safe mode???

[Red96Noma]

Check the jumpers on the drives, one should be set to master and the other to slave, if the slave is set to master it will try to boot form it first and when it finds to operating system it will boot from the other?

[Cryptic]

check your master/slave/auto_detect jumpers on your drives... perhaps try different combinations.

It might be a very good idea to put the new drive on its own channel (#2) as master.


move your cd-rom to slave on with your 20 gig as master on Channel 1

[Cryptic]

check your master/slave/auto_detect jumpers on your drives... perhaps try different combinations.

It might be a very good idea to put the new drive on its own channel (#2) as master.


move your cd-rom to slave on with your 20 gig as master on Channel 1


oohh ya just beat me to it

[wikked]

OK, so I'm trying to update my BIOS and I'm getting no where!!! Every file I DL from Dell just freezes... Can I get anything from the setup screen or safe mode???

jeebus..i hope you aren't just flashing your bios with random files that 'might be' the right one :D

[Scales]

OK, here's what I've done so far. Hopefully it's a step in the right direction. I updated my BIOS from A09 to A14 (yes is was a flash update from dell) and in the setup screen I enabled "quick startup"... From the time I hit restart til it gets to the password screen, it took 1 minute, 20 seconds... A TON faster then it was!!! Everything else is still slow!

red96noma and andy, you guys lost me. I have the 20G (from dell) switched to master and the WD 80G as slave. Should I switch those tabs to be opposite what they are now? Would my OS still function if it's on the "slave" drive then???

[theavenger333]

whats the speed on these HDs?

[Scales]

Not to sure on the speed of the one that came in the computer, but I think the 80G is a 7200...

[Undertaker]

Primary --- 20GB (Master) --- CD-Rom (Slave)

Secondary --- 80GB (Master)

You could always run the WD Diagnostic Tools on it, see if it finds any problems.