I have a WD 80GB 7200rpm harddrive. I had it a few months in my system which is a P4 2.53Ghz with Iwill P4GS i845G board. This drive was always secondary to my IBM 20GB drive, but I do have my win xp installed on it. I have started to experience a delay during a boot time. Before it starts reading off the disk after the post screen and device table there is a delay of like 20 seconds and then it goes to boot into winxp. I thought that setting the drive as a master would fix it but an awful thing happend. It wouldn't boot at all and make some awful noises and lock the sytem right after memory test. All settings were set right, and the same repeated when I had tha drive in the system alone by disconnecting all other drives including cdrom. I checked things many times. After trying for a long time, I reverted the drive back to the slave setting and BAH, it WORKED again with the same delay. But at least it worked. Can anyone explain that? To finish it off, the dirve is on the primary ide channel and programs on that drive start just tad slower than they used to.