[LUG] really slow booting

["Michael Mortimore" <nospamformike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My spiffy new computer is having booting problems. Originally I just took  
the 40gig ide drive out of another computer and used that. I've now  
bothered to install a 64-bit gentoo on a 250gig ide drive.

With the 40gig drive it all boots up quickly (haven't timed it but I guess  
it's no more than a couple of mins).

With the 250gig drive, the bios seems to take more than a minute to detect  
it and there's an even bigger delay getting to a grub screen. The kernel  
then complains:
ata7: link is very slow. please be patient
ata7: SRST failed (error=-16)
about 3 or 4 times.
again it probably hangs at this point for a few mins then the rest of the  
boot procedure is pretty quick.

Once it's booted, as far as I can tell the drive works fine. Hdparm  
reports:

/dev/sdc:   <- the 250 gig ide drive
 Timing cached reads:   6350 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3176.03 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   92 MB in  3.06 seconds =  30.11 MB/sec

/dev/sda: <- a 1.5 TB sata drive for comparison
 Timing cached reads:   6870 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3436.35 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  322 MB in  3.01 seconds = 107.07 MB/sec

That suggests to me that the link and the drive are working just fine.

I have tried fiddling with the cable to make sure it's all the way in,  
turning the cable around, disconnecting the cd drive so it's the only  
device attached, both plugs on the cable, another cable, fiddling with  
bios settings (various).

Apart from ditching the drive, I'm out of ideas what to do. Anyone seen  
this before?

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