25 second boot up delay after post/AHCI screens

Sub Styler said:

The problem may be enabling AHCI for your CD/DVD Drive which almost never support AHCI and then having your system try to boot from that first. If your BIOS permits it I would have AHCI enabled for hard disks and disabled for optical disks. If your OS is installed you may change the boot device priority to hard disk first. Then even if AHCI is enabled for you optical drive it shouldn't affect booting as your bios doesnt check the optical disk and just goes straight for the hard disk. although this still may cause issues when using the optical drive within the OS environment.

Damn it! You're right! Changing the first boot device to HDD got rid of the delay. What is interesting, I've had CD as first boot device since the day BIOSs supported boot sequences. A long time. And it has never caused this problem, only on the Gigabyte 6-series boards. It uses an Award BIOS.

Does anyone else have an Award BIOS that will do this if you boot from CD first.

I thought for a few seconds I might have a workaround. I have two sata controllers. I move the CD drives to the GSATA controller, run them in IDE mode and leave the harddisk in AHCI mode.

Problem is I have three optical drives, and the GSATA controller only support two devices, and it appears I cannot boot from the GSATA controller.

Well, fortunately, I don't need to boot from cd very often.

TVeblen said:

But here is what occurred to me: If you are going to run your computer in AHCI mode it is important to make that BIOS setting change BEFORE you install W7. If you did not that may explain the symptoms.

While clean installing W7 in AHCI mode is best, you can try and change over afterwards. See here: AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

Yep, on top of that one. I always clean install.

thanks for the tip.

Tanya

Tanyam said:

Does anyone else have an Award BIOS that will do this if you boot from CD first.

I do.

On a Gigabyte 6 series motherboard, no less.

My solution was to set the SSD as first in the boot sequence and to then use F12 when booting to bring up a screen to choose the DVD drive as the first boot device whenever necessary---without having to go into the BIOS and make a change. Like you, I rarely boot first from the DVD drive, but have historically always left it as first in the boot sequence as controlled in the BIOS. Can't do that anymore.

ignatzatsonic said:

Tanyam said:

Does anyone else have an Award BIOS that will do this if you boot from CD first.

I do.

On a Gigabyte 6 series motherboard, no less.

My solution was to set the SSD as first in the boot sequence and to then use F12 when booting to bring up a screen to choose the DVD drive as the first boot device whenever necessary---without having to go into the BIOS and make a change. Like you, I rarely boot first from the DVD drive, but have historically always left it as first in the boot sequence as controlled in the BIOS. Can't do that anymore.

Well, I think we'll have to consider this matter resolved. Looks like the Award BIOS has taken a backward step and that's just how it is. I will do the same as you, use F12 when I need to...

Now that's solved, it's time to look at SSD...

ArchaicWarrior said:

THANK YOU!! Tanyam, I've been racking my brain on this problem for months but you did the hard yards and found the flaw!

I'll set my SSD as my 1st boot drive but will keep AHCI as my DF case has a hot-plug drive that I use for backing up. Hoping this change will work .. otherwise I'll just live with it.

Only on this forum and only Tanyam was able to give an answer to this verryy frustrating problem, thanks all.

======

Post script - Works beautifully!

AW.

Glad that it works for you. Always good to hear about happy endings.

I think credit is due to others as well for the solution, such as ignatzatsonic.

---
Always rep people that help you