For years I have been suffering through intermittent long (4-5 minute) boot delays during the windows loading splash screen. In many cases my system will boot without any delay. When the boot delay occurs, the splash screen stays dim for several minutes. There is clearly some time-out being waited for. If I wait for the boot to complete, I will nearly always find that one of my SATA drives does not show up. I figured the problem was a bad motherboard and I've had an RMA from MSI that I just haven't used - I didn't want to be without my computer for several weeks. I tried to buy one even from MSI, but they don't make them any more. Recently these motherboards have shown up on ebay and it took me several weeks, but I finally won an auction. I swapped motherboards and don't you know it, I still have this problem! To avoid loss of my SATA drives, once I see the delayed/dimmed windows splash screen I power-off-reboot. This may require several attempts (as many as 10) before the boot completes. I would greatly like to figure out what is going on and fix it. My system info is: 2GHz Athlon-64 2x1gb RAM nVidia 6800GT AGP 2x160GB Maxtor PATA drives 2x300GB WD SATA drives floppy drive Memorex DVD +/-RW The installed nForce IDE drivers match the ones I find on the nVidia website (version 5.10.2600.446 dated 6/3/2004). I built this system December 2004. Linux boots without this problem - only Windows shows this as a problem. Since the SATA drives often disappear after a delayed boot, I tried one at a time unplugging one of the two SATA drives and booting to see if one of the drives was causing a problem. It still had a slow boot problem even with the missing drive not connected. I also tried to disable the SATA in the BIOS, but it still had slow boot. I have seen other (old) threads about boot delays, but I haven't seen anyone else reporting missing SATA drives if they wait for the slow boot to complete. I am almost to the point of upgrading to a completely new system to get beyond this boot issue, but I can see it will be difficult to migrate all of my hardware to any new motherboard, so it will be an expensive migration. I saw one suggestion to use bootvis to see where the delay is, but when I run it and reboot, it crashes after I log in. Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.