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POST SCREEN


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#1
Patrick-310

Patrick-310

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Ok this is my problem: I have a dell 531 that I dual booted with xp and vista. I have two hard drives a hitachi 320 that came with the dell, and added a WD 550 for a backup, both sata. I use the hitachi for the main boot and have it partitioned 170 for xp and 120 for vista. The computer originally came with vista. When I boot the computer the dell screen comes on and stays there for 20 seconds then comes to the screen that asks me which OS to use. I have the hard disk as first boot device and the right hard drive as well. Fast boot is enabled. Why does the POST screen take so long,
I have an older Dell that has xp and the "dell" screen takes only 2 seconds to get passed.

Any help i would greatly appreciate
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#2
shard92

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Well you could try hitting the esc key or the tab key and see if you can get the dell post to go away and see what it is hanging on... it could be that it is having trouble detecting the hard drive or maybe it's counting the ram.... if the machine has ide in addition to sata you could try disabling any that are not used... same with the sata... you could also check the setup... if there is a "quiet" boot that is often just the logo screen so you can't see the post info... you could also check to see if there is any settings for ram test/count....
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#3
Neil Jones

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Dells usually hang because the machine has been told to look for a hard drive that isn't there. Therefore in BIOS tell it not to look on the channels/ports that you don't have any drives (CD or otherwise) connected to.
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#4
Patrick-310

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Thanks for the replies, I will try both, however in the bios I didn't happen to see anything for the channel selector. I have a dell 531 S AMD 4400 hitachi 320 HD.
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