laptop startup issue

[Summit]

so I just reformatted my dell laptop hard drive, as I have done time and time again on my desktop, and now when I turn it on, it gets passed the "dell" loading screen (the one that says "press f2 to enter setup" or whatever) and then the screen goes blank for like 2 minutes before the white progress bar, just like the one that shows up when you go into "hibernation", shows up at the bottom of the screen. The only differences are, there is no text- it doesn't say anything, just the progress bar, and this progress bar takes like 10 minutes to completion before Windows loads.

I have no idea why this is happening. Any ideas? Clean hard drive... no idea what it could be.

[Avg]

I have never seen a pc coming out of hybernation so I don't know what the bar looks like, is it just a black screen with a grayish white progress bar at the bottom?

[Summit]

yeah just the progress bar

black screen, "|||||||||||||||| "

[Avg]

I get that on old pc running slow hdds, check the bios settings to see if everything is set right. Like the dma settings.

[Summit]

slow hdds? What should the bios settings be set to?

[Avg]

Old hdd, like the 5400rpm ones or the ones that had less then 10gb, for these drivers it took so long to load the necessary files to boot that my video card had enough time to refocus before the logo was loaded. What I mean by bios setting is that the drive is running in dma mode instead of pio, dma stands for Direct memory access, this is better because the hdd doens't need to wait for the cpu to transfer the data to the mem.

[Summit]

well it's a dell, can I even access these settings? I can change some of the bios settings by pushing f2 during startup or whatever, but are they all called the same things? like... do I have to go into "hdd settings" or is it called something else?

[Avg]

In some cases you can but they might change the name, like my cousin's instead of dma it had a hard drive performance setting which I could set to on and off, an easy way to check if dma is enabled is to go into the system's property then open the device manager under the hardware tab, then expand the ide ata/ataip controllers then right click the controllers that drop down and click property on each of them if there is more then one, then go to the primary channel tab and check the settings, the ide controller might be different from what I have told you, it will depend on the chipset.

[Summit]

oh right right I remember that, toggle on dma... those setting are already correct; its dma if available for both curren transfer mode selection menus.

could it be something else?