Hi.
I recently got a new drive (120GB Maxtor). I posted about a week ago about the fact that it reboots windows (crashes it actually, but it reboots instantly without any error screen - even with automatically reboot on error disabled) when i do two certain tasks, namely Clear All in Audio Record Wizard and using the slow motion feature on Media Player Classic.
Using the system log i found out that the error had something to do with a Parity error, and after having a look on the net the best advice i could get was to replace the IDE cable.
So i did this, bought*** an ATA-133 cable, but because of the layout of my case i couldn't set up the hard drives ( i also have a 40GB as a secondary - jumpers on both drives set to master on the 120Gb and slave on the 40GB) using the labels on the connectors. I'm pretty sure it's not a 80-pin IDE cable, so i don't think this is causing the problem. I can't remember without looking in the case, but the tag that says System Board is actually on one of the drives.
In fact, i know this doesn't cause the problem i'm having because i set the system up with the case open, and the master hard drive being the only one connected with the proper tags (ie. the system board connector was actually connected to the system board etc).
ANYWAYS lol, the problem i have now is that after POST checks, there is a 60 second delay (maybe about 75) before anything else happens, no HD action, just a flashing cursor on the top left of the screen. After this 60 or so seconds Windows XP boots normally.
Please take note - the delay is before Windows XP starts loading, there is a lot of stuff on the net about a delay after the Windows logo appears, and that concerns XP looking for network addresses etc, this is NOT my problem.
I replaced my XP installation on the system partition with a Drive Image backup i had from a clean install. This didn't help at all, so i reverted back to an image i made just before i reverted to the old backup.
My BIOS is crap, it's a Dell PC, and anyone that's seen those BIOS control screens they have will tell you they are very basic, all the features are hidden away pretty much. It's NOT a problem with the settings on the BIOS, at least not the one's i can see and control.
This happened before ages ago when i was running Windows 98, but the problem seemed to fix itself at somepoint.
Incidentally my floppy drive isn't working, but i may have left it unplugged because i took everything out and re-seated it all to make sure the connections were good.
Anyone shed some light on this? Intel 810e motherboard, 512MB RAM, 1Ghz PIII. Intel Application Accelerator installed (problem didn't appear until i messed with the new IDE cable. An important point to mention was that i replaced the new IDE cable with the older one that was working fine (apart from crashing when i did those two tasks i mentioned earlier, and the cable might not have even been the cause) and it had the same problem with the delay at boot.
Thanks in advance.
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