VERY Slow HDD and Boot

[bobsdad2005]

A few weeks ago my 3 year old stuck a screw driver in the front USB port and blew the motherboard and PSU.
I've had them replaced but I've lost some data of my drives.
I've replaced a 10G drive that I was using for the OS with a 30G and kept my 160G data drive.
I've reinstalled XP on the 30G and since then it's taking 20 mins to boot up.
The 160G data drive isn't showing up in XP (it's there in the BIOS and shows in Device Manager)
I've replaced the cables and tried changing from PIO mode to UDMA on the IDE properties.
Tried uninstalling the Primary IDE and rebooting, but still the same problem.
Is this down to the 160G drive being shafted (using data recovery on it), or something else.
I've run Hitachi's disk tests and checked the settings on the drive and the BIOS and they are all fine and as far as I can see as they should be.

New motherboard is a Foxconn 661MXPro.
P4 3.0Ghz
1G RAM
30G IBM-DTLA (Deskstar)
160G Hitachi Deskstar

Any help appreciated as I'm out of ideas.

 

[garebo]

Pardon me but sometimes i say 80 pin when i mean 80 conductor and they dont have an edit feature here. Both ide
40 conductor and 80 conductor cables have 40 pins. The 80 conductor is the dark grey (newer type) with thinner wires in it and the 40 conductor is the light grey, standard, older type with thick wires in it.
Just another thought toward the future since it seems you arent too familiar with 80 conductor cables. I did point out that you need to attach the blue end to the mobo, the master drive to the end and the slave drive in the middle.

What i didnt point out is that you will find that some hard drives will work with either cable and some will only work with a 40 conductor cable and some will only work with an 80 pin conductor. The newer the hard drive the more chance it will require or should have the 80 conductor cable. But again, i have run into this many times where i installed an 80 conductor ide cable on any older hard drive and the os wouldnt recognize the drive and i had to go back and install a 40 conductor cable.
I believe the rule of thumb is the 7200 spin drives will require the 80 conductor cable. Either way all you have to do is visit the drive mfgr website and check out which cable it requires.
Because some drives will accept either cable sometimes i believe the bios may have something to do with this.
Since 80 conductor cables produce better quality electrical connections and less interference, its best to use the 80 conductor as much as possible and only use the 40 when the 80 just wont work in an older drive.
For all cd,dvdroms and burners, its still the old ide 40 pin cable.





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