First of all, let me take the oppurtunity to big up the PCGuide site. I have been visiting and recommending it for years, although this is the first time I've been desperate enough to use the forum.

My problem is my hard disk which is running slowly and is not recognised during a normal boot.

Relevant System Details:
Asus nForce A7N266-C
Onboard PCI Bus Master IDE controller
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 7,200 RPM Ultra DMA/66 set as master.
Windows XP Pro installed on the DiamondMax.
Running on a UDMA 100 ribbon as Primary IDE.
Second (slave) HDD on the same ribbon is a Quantum Fireball.

The DiamondMax is not recognised during boot but if I set the BIOS to ignore the failure, the system somehow boots successfully (as you can see my knowledge of the boot process is very limited).

I partitioned the DiamondMax using XP when I installed the mobo so that it is roughly equally NTFS and FAT32 - XP is installed on the NTFS partition.

The HDD was previously installed on a BE6 which used a Highpoint HPT366 disk controller but I don't think this can be the problem as I have partitioned & formatted the drive since then.

PCMark score is 92.
Sandra score is 3102.
These scores are terribly bad!

The Windows XP loading screen takes about 10 seconds to appear during boot up. Performance under XP is not what I would expect.

My current guess is that it might be an IRQ problem.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions,
OnCider

Hmm, after reading the guide a bit further I think the boot problem might be somthing to do with the overlay that my old motherboard (BE6 with Highpoint HPT366) used.

Is it possible that Windows XP didn't clear this when I partitioned and reformatted the disk?

If so, how do I go about removing it?

OnCider

Usually with most of the overlay software if you run it again it will have a remove option, failing that it usually will require a wipe of the drive using a "zero-fill" utility, a program that writes nothing but zeros to the entire drive, thereby retruning it to a truly blank state and then this is followed by partitioning and formatting......

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mjc
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Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.