Very Slow W2K boot with Promise 378

Question

I just upgraded my system and installed a new WD74G Raptor, initially on the VIA SATA. This worked great, the boot time was really fast, around a minute, and the drive performed great.
I then wanted to add two 250G Maxtor drives to my system, and after spending some time trying to find out how to configure the promise RAID I gave up and decided to move the Raptor to the Promise SATA, and use the VIA RAID. (any info on setting up the Promise RAID would be great!). Once I moved the Raptor to the Promise RAID the windows boot time went up 5x. It stalls all the way through, not just at "detecting network setting", it even stalls after "loading personal settings". I hear the dive tick every 20 seconds, then finally after a few minutes it cranks and everything loads. After this the drive seems to work fine.
Any thoughts on why the change to the Promise SATA from the VIA SATA would cause this? I've got all the latest drivers, W2K-SP4, Athlon643000+,  BIOS v1.2.
Any help would be great.
Thanks,
-Mike

Answer 1

Quote
Originally posted by jj1109
Quote
Originally posted by mikeosbornma
(The LiveUpdate w/ Windows flash is sooooo much nicer than the old floppy method)
it's been mentioned a number of times that using the windows flash utility can sometimes cause problems, but there's more people out there who are more expert than me who are probably going to comment on that
Well, in my experiance the windows flash is linked to problems.
Making a flash and rescue disk is far safer
Just remember to disable the boot sector protection in bios.
cheers
jocko