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When an old motherboard meets a new l...

Trish's Escape from Hardware Hell Help Board » Setup and Configuration » All the Rest » When an old motherboard meets a new large hard drive « Previous Next »

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tsc
Posted on Tuesday, April 9, 2002 - 12:16 am:   

My pc is a Pentium II @ 300 MHz bought in 1997. Its motherboard is an Intel AL440LX flashed up to the latest BIOS upgrade. I have 98SE (and the boot.ini file) on a 6GB Seagate hard drive and XP Pro installed later on my second new 80GB Seagate hard drive in a conventional Windows dual boot arrangement. Everything is working fine except that, when the big hard drive has spun down after a period of inactivity, and I am in 98SE, switching to XP Pro via Restart and the Boot Menu happens too quickly for the big disk to spin up and the system hangs. Pressing the Reset button and starting Windows normally cures the problem but I would like a more elegant solution. Any ideas?
E.S.
Posted on Tuesday, April 9, 2002 - 9:06 am:   

Check in your bios for a setting to adjust HDD delay (the CA810 has one and the AL440LX may have one as well) to 2 or 4 seconds.
tsc
Posted on Tuesday, April 9, 2002 - 9:39 am:   

Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried this (set to six seconds) but it didn't seem to help. The delay seemed to be confined to only the small hard disk, with 98SE on it, set in the BIOS as the first hard disk to be booted up. But when the second hard disk had spun down, and I switched to XP via the Boot Menu, the second hard disk still was caught napping, so to speak, and appeared to be unaffected by the six second pre-delay in the BIOS.
E.S.
Posted on Tuesday, April 9, 2002 - 7:28 pm:   

Aside from partitioning the 80 gig so 98se and xp can reside on the same disk. you could try an off board type ultra ATA controller for the drives as more than likely the 80 gig drive is ATA66 or 100 and the controller on the LX is only capable of ATA33.

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