KT4 Ultra (MS-6590) very slow boot

Question

i got a strange one here:
i replaced my MSI K7T Turbo2 with a KT4 Ultra. Since i got the new board installed (the KT4 Ultra) the machine needs very long until it reads mbr of the disk. what i exactly mean is, post boot goes with normal speed. all settings (FSB speed, DDR speed, CPU speed) are correct. after post boot, when it should start to load windows from the disk, it takes > 1 minute until the boot screen of windows shows up. after windows could boot, i don't have any problems anymore (speed rocks). i did not have this problem with the K7T Turbo2 board and except memory i still use the same components:
MSI KT4 Ultra w 1.4 BIOS
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (not oc'ed) (~36-43C)
MSI G4Ti4200-TD(MS-8870)
Adaptec 39160 64bit dual (in a 32bit slot ;( )
3*Seagate ST318452LW X15 Ultra160 15K RPM
1 GB PC-2700 DDR (2x512MB)
Creative Soundblaster Audigy Gamer
Compaq NC3123 FastEthernet NIC
Logitech Mousman (dual optical) USB
Microsoft Sidewinder USB
the boot delay was not only when booting from the disks, i had the same experience when booting from cdrom: after post boot about 1 min. nothing and then excpected speed.
any idea?
thanks sidderz

Answer 1

thanks for the hints,
at the stage where boot is delayed so bad, HD access has not even been happened. the OS did not even start to load. so i don't believe the OS has anything to do with it. (except msi found a way to load the OS without read access to the drives )
like i said, right after post boot after floppy seek (my boot order: floppy, cdrom, scsi id 0) the machine just stops (for me it looks like bios is waiting for an answer and then times out) with a black monitor (but signal seems to be still there cause the monitor doesn't go to stand-by). first i thought about an IRQ conflict, but i took care to not use pci slots with shared IRQ's. when the computer starts to read from the disks, boot process is fast as expected. but until the system even starts to boot the os from the disks (read access to mbr on disks), more than one minute just nothing happens, not even disk access. i also checked if the computer is just frozen, but this was not the case, at least the keyboard was not frozen (numlock/capslock and reboot with ctrl+alt+del still worked)
honestly i believe it's a bios issue