[navnut]

Holy crap i adjusted the jumper on the slave with no luck. So now when slave is set to none with no power connected it says
"Disk Boot failure Insert system disk and press enter"
Why is it doing this when the master is still set to my PC's original drive.
I disconnected the molex and IDE cable and set the slave to manual and then it says
"Primary slave hard disk fail" and "Press f1 to continue"
Pressed F1 and it took quite a while to boot which is how i finally got here.
Do you think a system restore would cure my problems?

[navnut]

Its taking me 10 mins to boot now. I just want to go back to normal screw the old drive, can anyone tell me how i can go back to default please?

[spot]

If I had to guess - and it's a wild guess - your BIOS or XP currently thinks your 120GB drive is 16-bit instead of 32-bit, having dropped the rating during your changes and not being inclined to put it back to where it ought to be.

Were it mine, I'd power off and unplug,

check the 120GB has no bent pins, is MASTER and on the primary IDE cable,

check the CD/DVD is MASTER and on the secondary IDE cable,

remove the clock battery from the motherboard for 60 seconds and replace it (that clears the CMOS memory which holds the BIOS settings - there are other ways which involve floppy-boot programs or Jumper One faffing but we'll avoid those)

Plug in, boot to BIOS (it'll force you in there, it has no date and time), press whatever function key it asks you to, set the date and time, leave all drives on AUTO, press the "load the DEFAULT (or SAFE) settings" function key and save and exit.

Does that get you back to booting at a reasonable speed? If it does we can reset any go-faster memory access speeds in the BIOS later but they're insignificant compared to that 16-bit setting, if that's what it was.

If that's what it wasn't then we might have to find the setting in Control Panel / System / Properties and select the Hardware tab. Click the Device Manager button. Expand the entry for IDE/ATAPI controllers. Select the primary channel and click on Properties, and then choose the Advanced Settings tab. For each device listed, change the transfer mode to "DMA if possible." Repeat the process for the secondary channel, click OK to get all the way out and then reboot.

Has all that got rid of the ten-minute boot time?

[navnut]

The cmos battery trick helped a bit but is still takes longer then before to boot and system performance is alittle sluggish.
And for some reason at the post screen the whole screen text is fuzzy and blurred but as soon as it gets past that everything is fine.

[spot]

The POST screen blurring rings no bells with me.

I presume you checked the "DMA if possible" settings.

If you get http://belarc.com/free_download.html it might tell you in detail what your motherboard and memory are. We need to know that to be able to set the faster latency settings in the BIOS to get the machine to its optimum settings. If you're not sure what it's telling you, copy/paste the first lines down to where it gets obsessed with software.

[navnut]

Advanced settings for my primary IDE are "DMA if available" for device 0 with a current transfer mode of "PIO".
Device 1 "DMA if availabble", current transfer mode "Not applicable.
Advanced settings for secondary IDE for Device 0 is "DMA if available" current transfer mode "Ultra DMA mode 2" which is exactly the same for Device 1.

[spot]

There's your culprit then. Whatever's forcing the master IDE to PIO instead of DMA is trashing your speed. Try swapping the cables, maybe it's kinked in the past and it can't handle the rated transfer speed. I can't simulate what's in front of you so I can't see what you can adjust to switch back to DMA but that's your objective.

If someone reads the thread who has XP in front of them they might go and find the right pull-down list or checkbox.

[navnut]

A7N8X2.0 Rev2.
2048 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'DDR1' has 1024 MB
Slot 'DDR2' has 1024 MB
Slot 'DDR3' is Empty
These modules are 1G 184 pin unbuff DIMM 128MX64 DDR PC3200 if that helps.

[navnut]

Swapped cables with no change in performance.

[philthomas]

There is a well known fault in XP, whereby the DMA setting will revert to PIO, after several unsuccessful read attempts and then will stay there.

Try going to Device Mangler/IDE ATA ATAPI Controllers, right click the Primary Channel and select "Uninstall", confirm your choice and then reboot the PC.

Now check to see if the Device 0 is set to DMA. If it isn't then there may be a fault with your IDE cable, as spot said, or it may be the sign that your drive is going bad.

Having said all that, this may not help with slow boot up times if the problem is before XP, as this setting only applies in XP ..... but it will certainly speed things up from the point where XP is .loaded.