HELP... newb in the house

[Adnan769]

Hi all,
This is my first attemt at building my own gaming rig and I'm kinda having problems already... I'm hust puzzled why my rig spends so much time at the post screen (1-2) minutes and is extreamly slow during boot up even before I install Windows XP...which strangely turned to be another pain in the neck as I never had any problems formatting older PC's before but it wont get into windows (which I already installed) without the CD in the drive.
This rig turned to be slower booting up than my 2 year old laptop...

My new rig specifications are as follows:

Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Royal
Pentium D 830
Leadtek Geforce 7800GTX
Enerman Liberty 620W PSU
Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB kit DDR2 PC2-5300
2 x Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 250GB SATA-II 16MB cache
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 80GB ATA-133 8MB cache
HP lightscribe 840 Dual layer DVD-RW
Plextor PX-130 DVD-ROM

Ps: I'm Installing windows on the Maxtor 80GB (20GB partition for OS)

and Thank you in Advance

 

[semi-pro waster]

Welcome to the forums. Are you Raiding the WD drives? If not then I'd suggest that you turn off the Raid functionality in the bios to speed up the boot times, also you could enable quick POST if you haven't done so.

I rather suspect the problem is that you have got some of the files for loading Windows on the wrong drive. What I'd do is disconnect both SATA drives and reinstall Windows then reconnect them and that will hopefully speed you up.

 

[Dutch Guy]

Why install Windows on the slower IDE drive

Maybe the delay is because the SATA drives are in a RAID config ?

 

[AFK_Matrix]

Hi,

Can't help you on the slow boot, but might be able to help on having to boot with the CD in the drive, as I had the same thing after moving around my drives in my computer.

I have a DFI board so not sure its going to be the same but try going into ** BIOS then go into where you can change the boot sequance. Now on the BIOS for my DFI i have some additional options here and one of them is Boot Priority i think, and I went in there and it had actually got my 2 drives the wrong way round so it couldn't boot.

Not sure if thats clear, if not contact me via msn and i'll talk u through it a bit better.

 

[Adnan769]

Thank you all for replying

semi-pro waster : I'm Not raiding the WD drives and I already turned off the raid feature from the bios. I will disconnect them and re-install windows to see what happens.
I searched all around the bios but couldn't find a quick post option

Dutch Guy : I did so because I wanted the other drives for games and video files. I think it should be fine as my laptop boots into windows in about 40 sec
with a P4 2GHz processor and IDE drive. I know its silly but this is me I act before I think.

AFK_Matrix : I checked the boot priority and its set to boot from the Maxtor then the other WD SATAII drives. However I manipulated the boot sequience to: 1: CD-ROM 2:HDD 3:None insted of 1:FDD 2:HDD 3:CD-ROM as I did not add a FDD to my system.

Again thank you for your replies. I will try your suggestions and post the situation later.

 

[Dutch Guy]

Dutch Guy : I did so because I wanted the other drives for games and video files. I think it should be fine as my laptop boots into windows in about 40 sec
with a P4 2GHz processor and IDE drive. I know its silly but this is me I act before I think.

Well, you thought about it and the difference will not be huge but I think that the bast way to get a slightly faster system is to put Windows on the fastest drive as you will not be limited by the harddisk when playing/encoding/decoding a movie.

 

[Adnan769]

Well Guys, I tried all your suggestions but unfortionatly nothing worked booting up still takes ages and I still need to keep the OS CD-ROM in the drive although it doesn't use it to boot and if I didn't keep it in the drive it will tell me that the system drive failed.
However once I'm in Windows I can take it out and everything works fine until the next boot up.

Could it be that the Maxtor drive is causing all these problems as I read from other posts that other people have suffered from them.

Thanks again Guys.

 

[Amp34]

and I still need to keep the OS CD-ROM in the drive although it doesn't use it to boot and if I didn't keep it in the drive it will tell me that the system drive failed.
However once I'm in Windows I can take it out and everything works fine until the next boot up.

My computer started doing this the other day, its really annoying. It did this previously and the only thing i could find was to reinstall windows. Any ideas how i can repair it without having to reinstall?

 

[Larok]

I'd be tempted to reinstall windows and connect just one sata hard drive/turn all the riad options off on the bios.

See how you go and set up the other drives later if all is well.

 

[Adnan769]

Amp34: My computer started doing this the other day, its really annoying. It did this previously and the only thing i could find was to reinstall windows. Any ideas how i can repair it without having to reinstall?

Even reinstalling didn't solve the problem. If you find any clue would you please post, I will do the same here.

Larok: I'd be tempted to reinstall windows and connect just one sata hard drive/turn all the riad options off on the bios.

I took out both of the WD SATAII drives and did a fresh install for Windows on the Maxtor but still I face the same problem even if both of the SATAII drives are not connected.

Also I went to the shop where I bought the OS CD-ROM from but they couldn't help me get over this problem.

Although it works fine in windows I must say that its irritating to wait so long for it to boot and remmembering to keep the CD in the drive.

Thanks Guys I really appreciate you help.

 

[Phoenix211]

try installing windows on the sata drives. It makes much more sense. might be the maxtor is bust a bit? is windows nice and fast when booted?

 

[Adnan769]

Phoenix211: try installing windows on the sata drives. It makes much more sense. might be the maxtor is bust a bit? is windows nice and fast when booted?

In windows everything is normal its preformance is what you would expect from these specifications and it does paly games well.

By the way the post proccess was solved "a bit" as I contacted gigabyte technical service and turned out that I connected the HDD on the wrong IDE connector as the motherboeard has 3 of them, IDE1/2 for optical drives and IDE3 for HDD's (I connected it to IDE1 last time ). The problem now is that the Bios does not detect the HDD when connected to IDE3, it only detects the optical and SATA drives.

It looks like this build would give me some white hair

I will go to play with some settings to get it working again hopefully.