OK, I admit... It's been a while since I put together a PC. But this is really too weird. At startup, even before having an OS installed, there was a tremendous delay when the BIOS tried to detect the IDE devices. Just two, a hard disk drive on the primary and a CDROM on the secondary. How hard can that be to detect?
Well appearently very hard, because the waiting started to bother me from the first boot I had to make. So you start tweaking the BIOS settings. The
BIOS Optimization Guide seemed a good place to start. But allas, whatever I tried it was of no use.
Hours later, after searching the web for known issues with my drives and/or mobo, I finally keyed the right phrase into google and asked
'slow boot in bios'. And there my answer was, only one click and some scrolling away.
Googles first result, opened a discussion thread called 'Slow Booting' and hidden under 'Response Number 6' I found what I was looking for.
Hold on: the jumpers on the IDE devices need to be set to
cable select. The setting
master is not good enough anymore. Why, why, WHY!?