strange behavior of Biostar motherboard

Need some input to a wierd problem I'm having with an existing Biostar
M7NCD Pro board. Here's the background:

Working config for the past 14 months:
It has an AMD Anthlon XP 2600+ CPU installed. It also has 2 512MB
DDR333 SDRAM modules installed in dual channel mode. GeForce 3 AGP
video card installed. A Samsung 40x CDRW drive (2nd IDE, Master), a 12x
DVD-ROM (2nd IDE, Slave), a 100GB Maxtor ATA133 IDE drive (1st IDE,
Master), onboard sound enabled, onboard lan enabled, all 6 USB2 ports
enabled. serial enabled, parallel enabled. No floppy drive ever in
this system. Enermax 400W PS. XP Pro as the OS, no issues.

Current config:
I recently purchased a new SB Audigy 2 ZS sound card, and a WD 200GB
EIDE HD and wanted to start my XP fresh, so I powered down, unplugged,
and installed the SB card in the 2nd PCI slot from the top, and swapped
HD drives. Powered up, flashed the BIOS with the latest code from
Biostar website (bios date 3/11/04), disabled the onboard audio and
serial ports.

Symptoms:
- Unusually long POST times, even with quickboot enabled
- If I install XP fresh, after I get it installed, if I reboot, the
system doesn't see any OS on the drive and asks for a system disk on reboot.
- To install XP, the system takes 5 minutes to even show the text mode
install screen when I boot from the CD.

I've tried disabling the DVD-ROM to see if it was an issue - no change
to the symptoms.

Suggestions would be nice. Thanks for reading.

Kevin

 

Does the 100G drive do this or just the new one?
If only the new get the diagnostics from WD and
check it out.

 

Does the BIOS specifically state that it overcomes the 137 GB barrier?
Just seems like something worth checking out, given that you had no
problem with the drive whose capacity is below that limit and you're
now having problems with a drive whose capacity is above that limit.

 

Just the new drive does this. The old one is fine.

 

Hard to say - the Biostar website doesn't have a readme for the latest
BIOS that I downloaded. I am suprised that no docs for the changes are
available.

 

Then go here and get the DLG Diagnostic
to check it out. The symptoms are of a bad drive.
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

 

A post on Tom's Hardware told me to remove the HD master/slave jumper
completely and try to boot up. The very slow boot up issue went away,
and now I'm going through the XP install now. Will post the final
resolution soon (fingers crossed!)

kevin