Long BIOS pause on SATA screen when booting

[sync]

I have an XPS 410. Recently the BIOS pauses for about 30 seconds on the SATA screen when booting.

I found that if I switch SATA to ATA emulation then there is no pause but Vista won't boot.

When I look at the boot sequence in the BIOS it shows the SATA hard drive as 'not present'. It does not show that for the CD-ROM which is also SATA. I also noticed that if I put a bootable CD-ROM in the drive, it will boot even though that is only second in the boot sequence after the hard drive.

 

[PuppyLinux]

Can you provide a link to a .PDF of your system manual?

 

[crjdriver]

Have you tested the drive with the drive maker's utility?

FWIW when you change the mode of an onboard type controller ie sata/ide/raid/achi, it uses a different driver and that can be why you do not get a boot.

With vista I am surprised that it did not boot. I recently did a build where vista had already been installed on an nforce4 mb [sata drive] A new intel p35 chipset board was installed along with other parts. Vista actually booted without issue; going from nforce4>p35/ich9 is really amazing since I told him it would not even boot.

 

[sync]

Can you provide a link to a .PDF of your system manual?

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim9200/en/index.htm

 

[sync]

With vista I am surprised that it did not boot.

Vista was pre-installed and it would have used the SATA driver. When I put it in ATA mode, then I guess Vista can't find that driver.

 

[crjdriver]

That is probably what happened; as I posted, I am surprised it would not boot. Since I first hand saw it go from a sata drive on an nforce4 board to the same drive connected to an intel p35/ich9 chipset board.

I did not even expect it to boot. When I first started the system, I went into the bios and set boot order, checked temps, set time/date, etc. Saved settings and restarted. Well I forgot to put the vista dvd in the drive and it booted up without problems.

Of course I did recommend a clean install since that is a much better way to go however it is still running a week later with no problems at all. It did need reactivation however nothing else other than load the chipset, sound, and nic drivers after the system started up.

 

[sync]

I remembered something that may be relevant. I installed XP for dual-booting. The XP install disk does not have SATA drivers. The XP install stopped with an error and a hard boot was required to recover. That is when the BIOS pause first appeared. But it went back to normal on subsequent boots.

I tried several different things to get XP installed the way I wanted. So I had a bunch of hard reboots. Each time I would get the pause which then went away. At some point though, it did not go away.

I would love to know what caused this strange behavior pf a pause that went away on the next boot.