Kurtz Hz

I had a similar conundrum in which my i815 based system would pause for several seconds after the boot screen in windows 2000. I solved it by removing unused IDE channels in Control Panel | System | Device Manager, and setting each slave and master to its correct transfer mode (i.e. PIO4, UDMA4, etc...) Note that you may have to do this in Windows AND your BIOS. I guarantee a 4 second reduction in boot time good luck.