Gateway: unit takes 2 minutes to detect drives

[jdavis71]

I have a Gateway e4200 that is part of a 30 unit lab. Once you push the power button, it takes a 55-60 seconds to find the hard drive on the primary controller, then it takes another 30-40 seconds to find the cdrom on the secondary controller. After detection, the machine boots up normally, and even functions like it should inside of windows. Gateway sent me a new motherboard and ram, which yielded the same results. Now they want me to pull everything but the hard disk, ram, and processor.

Any ideas about this one? All of the other e4200 in the lab find the drives in like 5 seconds.

-Jdavis

 

[keanon]

turn your cdrom's setting the bios from AUTO or CD to NONE.
make sure you have the newest BIOS also.
i've seen this a lot on machines that have a cd-r drive.

 

[SnowPunk98]

Check all the IDE cables and power cables and jumpers check the BIOS too

 

[Lord Gwynz]

I agree with keanon, try setting harddrive autodetect to none in the BIOS. I had to do this recently with my POS BlasterPC which would freeze up at bootup as soon as it got to autodetecting my WD 40 gig hd. I figured the BIOS was too old to recognize anything > 32 gigs but I couldn't locate a BIOS update anywhere for this machine. Windows did however find the drive so it wasn't a total loss

 

[jdavis71]

After going through all of the hardware swapping, it turned out to be a bad hard drive. Thanks for the input guys.

-jdavis