not sure if this is a problem with windows or the hardware. my grandmother has a fairly basic PC. 2.2ghz pentium running XP. she was complaining about a few things, then her power supply died.

i replaced the PSU, and decided i should jsut backup her files, and give her a fresh install because of many of the problems she was having.

everything went well, except i ran into a strange problem with her motherboard. it wouldnt detect the harddrive, then it would, but only if the disk drive wasnt plugged in. on and on. strange stuff. then it seemed to work.

now, when it boots up, after the Bios screen, theres a black screen with a cursor for about 30 seconds, then the screen goes black for a minute and a half or so, then the window loading screen comes on. it loads quick, and the PC runs great, but booting takes FOREVER because of this. whats going on? is this windows fault?

her mobo is an Asus P5S800-VM. im using PATA drives, even though it has SATA support.

The NT bootstrap and then the kernel are read from disk and loaded after the POST completes and the boot is handed off to read the sectors of disk containing the boot code - the behavior leads me to believe there's still some issue accessing the hard disk immediately. I would be suspicious that the PSU wasn't the only problem she had, and I would start testing all the hardware to make sure it's not the MOBO or some RAM going bad in there.

my grandmother has a fairly basic PC. 2.2ghz pentium running XP. she was complaining about a few things, then her power supply died.

If I were were you I would try to please your granny, it seems like strange things happen when she complains about something/womeone.

Seriously, it could well be RAM, or even a bad cable for the hard disk.

Can you try the hard disk (as slave) on another machine - possibly with the HD manufacturer testing software?

Any strange noises coming from the HD?

jaclaz

Double check your jumpers and all IDE and power cables.

man, you guys are the best. it wasnt set to Master, so i changed the jumper. i also put a new IDE cable in. went from 115 seconds to 25. thanks for your help!