Why Does The A7V Boot So Slowly?

What a PCI IDE or RAID controller essentially does is fool the motherboard into thinking it’s some sort
of SCSI device.

SCSI devices need some time to look around and figure out what’s attached to it, even if there’s only one item attached. This is perfectly normal.
Maybe not desirable, but it’s normal, have had that with every SCSI and RAID controller I’ve ever dealt with.

This is going to be just as true for any motherboard that uses such controllers (which looks to be most of the new mobos coming out with Via chipsets).

There’s supposed to be some hacked BIOS out there that’s supposed to eliminate the wait. What I don’t know is how it goes about doing that. If the hack simply disables the
Promise controller; that may not be a good idea.

I’m using a hacked Promise card as essentially a PCI IDE controller because the regular IDE controllers on the K7M are pretty slow. If you have a newer board, I think you should
see how well the regular IDE controllers work before you knock out the Promise controllers.

Besides, the speed of your computer is not really determined by how fast it boots. The speed of booting is determined by how the motherboard goes through its functions. For instance, Super 7 machines used to boot a lot faster than PII machines, but the chips sure weren’t a lot faster.

Without the PCI controller, the K7M certainly boots faster than a BX board, but that has nothing to do with the CPU.

Email Ed