very slow POST

[Segment]

I'm having a problem with a Gateway GP6-450. It has a JABIL BX MB, PII 450, 256 RAM. It was working fine and I installed a Lexmark X75 USB printer. It worked fine with that until I checked one of it's TSR programs in MSCINFIG/Startup and rebooted.

Now it takes about 3 minutes to go through the boot process and get to a single beep. Then I get a blinking curser for about 6 more minutes until suddenly up pops Windows 98SE happy and with no apparent problems.

I've tried unchecking almost everything in startup. Same wait. I tried a different hard drive. Same wait. I got online with Gateway and flahed the BIOS. Same wait. I changed out the battery, and cleared the BIOS with the jumper. No joy.

I'm about out of ideas but if anyone can think of something else to try I'd appreciate it. Thanks

[BipolarBill]

Try removing one drive at a time and see if there's a drive detection issue. Check jumpers and cables carefully.

Try it without the printer too. I find that wacky Lemark USB printers sometimes benefit from being unplugged from the AC power for awhile.

[Segment]

Thanks Bill,

It does detect the drives accurately after counting the memory and then just hangs for several minutes until it beeps once and goes to a black screen with blinking curser until Windows starts after about 6 minutes. I went in and removed all the cards and blew out the dust and reseated the cards and checked all the cables. I only adjusted the one CMOS reset jumper and I never touched any of the others. I did disconnect the printer.

It seems slow like an overheating problem but it is a slot mounted CPU with this huge heat sink on it and it has never had this problem before. Besides Windows runs fine.

[BipolarBill]

If you can alter the boot sequence in BIOS, try setting it to HDD only and not to seek other devices. If you have a CD in the drive (Epson disk?), remove it.

[rmanet]

hit F8 and use the bootlog option - it'll create a bootlog.txt in your C: directory - open it with notepad and see what's there, maybe learn something about a process in startup or boot that's taking waaaay too long?

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Erm, not wanting to sound like a simpleton here, but have you checked in the BIOS to see if Quick Post has somehow been disabled

--Jakk:t

[BipolarBill]

Let me tell you what I'm thinking here. I'm thinking that the BIOS is reading a CD that was left in the tray as a bootable CD. It's chewing on it and trying it and taking it's sweet time before it gives up.

It's happened to me. :(