Problem: Very slow bootup while grub tries repeatedly to get responses from a dead ide slave drive. If the ide slave drive is disconnected bios apparently spends a long time searching for ide drives and grub loads very slowly but, once loaded, boots the system quickly. If I enter bios at power up it has not found the master ide drive and both master and slave are shown as none. Grub must be searching for the drives during its slow load as once it has loaded it boots up the system with master ide drive recognized and useable.
History: I had two ide drives, master with windoz and slave with debian. Slave started to die so I added two sata drives and transferred debian to a sata drive. Bios startup was extremely slow when I disconnected the ide slave so I left it connected but with no entry for it in fstab. Many months passed during which I abandoned windoz completely and converted the ide master to an ext3 data drive. Until the last few days bios and grub had no problem with the unused ide slave drive but it must have suffered a further failure which led to the problem discribed above. Setup: ECS KA3 MVP motherboard, debian lenny Possible Fix: Buy cheap ide hard drive and install as ide slave replacing failed drive. This seems unnecessary and stupid. With the sata drives I already have far more storage than I need. Any ideas, Tom
