re: boot screen lags at "searching for IDE drives"
Thursday, December 25, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by C K
(6528 messages posted)
It's not unusual for the BIOS screen to report that it is looking for an IDE drive.
SATA is basically for a simple explanation on an IDE interface only an advanced
interface. It is SATA instead of the old PATA. XP doesn't support the advanced
spec of the SATA so actually runs in an older IDE mode. Vista supports the advanced
features of the SATA specification.
If you can verify that nothing changed in the BIOS, I would say from experience that
you have a failing drive. This is usually the symptoms of this issue. If your machine
has hardware diagnostics available to run, you can run tests on the drive, or if
the drive manufacture has a diagnostics utility for their drives, download and run
it. Even if it checks OK, that won't mean that it is. Also check the Event Viewer
for errors pertaining to the hard drive.
This may explain the confusion over the IDE message on the screen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
Also another discussion on typical misunderstanings of SATA and IDE:
http://forum.soft32.com/windows/SATA-IDE-ftopict379279.html
Bottom line, I would suspect you have a failing drive and would recommend that you
have a spare on hand. The first SATA drives were poor on reliability and from what
I see come in, PATA drives are still a little more reliable and less error prone.
Anytime electronics has a speed boost, issues usually crop up that have to be ironed
out, and they still aren't all solved from the testing I have done. Quite a bit better
than when they were first released though..
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 | |  | re: boot screen lags at "searching for IDE drives" (C K: Thu, Dec 25, 2008, 10:30 pm) |
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