A few windows 7 configuration problems

[[SoC]GHOST]

I have been running on my new board for about 3 weeks now and its doing ok, but there are a few things that aren't quite right. First off, the bois on this board takes a very long time to post. This may be due to something being misconfigured but I have not yet been able to find a setting to remedy this. The second thing is, Windows takes a long time to boot. As soon as bios hands off to Windows, I see the load screen but the hd pauses for about 45 seconds. It used to be alot longer until I found a setting in bios that enables sata 1-3 to run in native mode. It still seems way to long. I see the loading screen but there is no hd activity for 45 seconds. Once the hd kicks in I see the four Windows colors come together and the OS loads in about 5 seconds. I never had a problem loading 7 in a timely manner on my old system. THe old box ran nf680i lt board and 74gig raptor drive. The new runs a gigabyte P45 board and 640gig WD caviar blue drive. I can't figure out if its a bios thing, a harddrive problem, or simply my lack of ram {currently 2 gig}. The memory is getting upgraded on Monday, so that should eliminate that problem, but the boot issues bother me. When I attempted to run the WD Data life gaurd tools it does not show any physical drives. All my drives show as logical and the test will not run, becuase I cannot select a drive to run them on. I looked in Windows disc management and saw that the primary windows partition C was not set as active, but instead a 100mg "System" partition was set as the primary boot active drive. So I moved the active to the Primary C and Windows would not start. It told me that ntldr was missing. I had to run WIndows repiar to fix that. So now I am at a loss. The other suspecious thing is that my 640gig drive is only showing 599gig in Windows. Now I know there is some unallocated space normally that the heads use as a landing zone, but 40gigs seems wrong. I'm not sure what else to try at this point short of reloading and reformating everthing. Does anyone have any ideas. When W7 is loading and running I have no problems at all.

[Jafo]

Check Intel's website for chipset drivers. They have an INF Update Utility for Series 5, 4, 3 and 900 chipsets. Try that first.

If that doesn't work then remove the drive and try installing on an older, known-good, hard drive on the same controller and port and see if it still does the same thing. If the problem still occurs then you have eliminated the hard drive as a problem. If it works like it should then I would return the drive for another.

[[SoC]GHOST]

Well I tried what you said with the driver and it didn't help. I will be installing more RAM tonight and will see if that is the cause. If that doesn't do it, then I will be reformating that drive next weekend to see if its a partition issue. I also might try putting it on a different drive. Hopefully the memory will do it, however I'm not to sure at this point it will work. It looks to have been beat up in shipping. You would think that if you overnight something it will be handled with care. Nope, the ram came in a small factory sealed box and then just put in an padded envelope. That seems to be an error in judgement for something that is so suseptable to EMI.

[[SoC]GHOST]

I got my Patriot memory yesterday and it didn't work. I'm really starting to hate this board. I am sending it back after trying every possible setting to get it to post. I ordered good ole g.skill pc6400 to replace it. Maybe this will be stable enough to post and run.