long pause during boot

lately when i boot my computer, there is a long pause between the screen with the large windows logo with the progress bar and the welcome screen. the first time it did this it said there was a problem with one of my slave drives, but chkdsk cleared it up. this is the second time that i've booted and seen this long pause. the screen just goes blank for a while, but my monitor doesn't say that it will go into off mode in 5 seconds like it normally does when there's no signal. what could be the problem here?

check event viewer. Could be many things. bad driver, something not responding to Windows calls.

thanks for the tip. with event viewer i was able to determine that it was indeed that one hard drive. it was giving a bunch of disk errors about being unresponsive. right now i'm trying to recover the files. i certainly hope i can because that's the hard drive that has most of my stuff on it...about 100gb. i suspect that it was damaged somehow during transportation. hopefully a format will restore it to what it once was.

EDIT: the latest string of errors was this over and over:

The device, \Device\Harddisk1\D, has a bad block.

before that, the error was this:

The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period.

it only does that when that certain slave drive is installed, so it's obviously pointing to that one. what are the odds of me getting my data back and fixing the drive? i have the western digital data lifeguard tools on a cd if that will help any.

now i can't even get the drive to work with chkdsk. when i run it, it says that many file record segments were unreadable (26000 - 44000). it also says there was insufficient disk space to fix each one. that was when i ran chkdsk with the /F option. right now i'm trying to run it with the /R option. is there anyway to have it write the recoverable data to a different drive? or better, is there some other way to get my data back?