Slow Boot after power outage

[LOTL]

Hi All,
Took a friends Dell Dimension 4600 home yesterday to see what i could do with it.
I guess they had a power outage at his house and after it came back on, his Dell took forever to boot and then it ran extremely slow once windows came up.
It does the same thing in Safe Mode. I ran Seatools on the hard drive and it shows that the current temp is 253. Doesnt say C or F, but i have to imagine they are talking Fahrenheit. The drive itself doesnt feel all that hot. For the heck of it, i tossed in a spare 20 gigger and tried installing XP to it. It was taking forever to load the files, so i shut it down and tried running Seatools again on this used spare drive.
Same thing with the Current temp showing 253. After running the extended test on both drives neither one shows any errors. Prior to running the tests though seatools mentions that both drives had been over temp - 253.
Something tells me some part of the motherboard got fried. The BIOS doesnt tell me squat for temps. Im gonna run Memtest 86 on the RAM and see how it checks out.
Just remembered that the floppy drive was showing as undetected in the BIOS, even though it was enabled and plugged in correctly. Could be related? Ill try pulling the CPU and cleaning the HSF, and reapplying some thermal paste.
Any other thoughts are appreciated.

[Midknyte]

If it isn't a seagate drive, then the temp reading is wrong. ignore it.

i'm guessing your friend doesn't have a UPS.

[LOTL]

If it isn't a seagate drive, then the temp reading is wrong. ignore it.
i'm guessing your friend doesn't have a UPS.

Yes both were maxtors which seatools will work with. Couldnt find my Maxtor diagnostics disk, but ill download it again somewhere and give it another shot.
Nope no UPS and they had it plugged into a very cheap surge protector.
Strange i ran memtest late last night and it loaded up quick enough, but its tests took forever to run. I think this one is ready for the Dell boneyard.

[Steve R Jones]

Look in Device Manager->Controller cards and see what "mode" the drive is running in. It should be DMA.

[LOTL]

Look in Device Manager->Controller cards and see what "mode" the drive is running in. It should be DMA.

Thanks Steve there was an option in the BIOS for DMA, i set it to on and nothing changed. The fact that it was taking forever to copy the files from the XP CD during installation to the spare HD i had, tells me its something more.
Ill try and get this thing to boot again and see if im able to navigate to the device manager.

[LOTL]

Well this is a head scratcher. I waited the 10 mins from power off till i was able to navigate into the device manager and low and behold the Current Transfer mode was set to PIO. The Transfer Mode was set to DMA if Available but it was greyed out.
Went back to the BIOS and checked to see where the setting for "IDE Drive UDMA" was set to and it was off again. Turned it on and this time it booted a whole lot faster. Turning this on was one of the first things i did. Hmmm i dunno maybe i missed something, didnt save it coming out of the BIOS the first time?
I checked the System Log in the BIOS and there was an entry in there from the day he started having problems "CMOS Checksum Error".
I suspect that some settings somehow got changed, whether by the power outage/surge or by someone in there mucking around. Ill have to leave it powered off for a day and check the BIOS settings again. Maybe the battery is on its way out.
Good call and thanks Steve for making me double check that.
I also found another setting that got the floppy working again.