Resolved Motherboard taking a long time to boot

Hey folks,

I've got a bit of an annoying issue here. I upgraded most of the parts in my PC around April this year. Here are my current specs:

Mushkin 120GB SSD (+a bunch of other WD hard drives, about 2TB total)
Intel i7 2600 3.4GHz
ASRock P67 EXTREME4 GEN3
ATI Radeon HD6870 GPU
G.SKILL Ripjaws 8GB DDR3 RAM
CORSAIR TX750 V2 PSU
Hyper 212 Cooler

The problem is that whenever I turn on my computer, my motherboard is stuck on the boot screen for maybe 1-2 minutes until it beeps and goes to the Windows load screen. When I first got the upgrade, it was fine - it would beep within a couple of seconds, plus having an SSD gave me a total boot time of around 10-13 seconds, it was just wonderful.

But for some reason, after some time, it started to get slower and slower - occasionally doing it quickly like before, but most of the time it'd take it 20-30 seconds. Now, however, it's gotten to the point where it always takes a minute or two to beep. My SSD starts a bit slower too now, Windows loading takes a bit longer and once I log in it takes longer to start everything up, unlike the almost instantaneous boot before. Perhaps a windows reinstall is in order, which is why I doubt this is related to the motherboard issue.

Anyway, anyone have any idea what this could be? It's getting frustrating to wait this long and I'm starting to get worried that the mobo is just procedurally getting worse. I feel like any day now it will just freeze up on the boot screen forever.

Thanks in advance for the help!
-Litos

 

This sounds like it is having problems passing POST - power-on self test. That would lead me to suspect the graphics, RAM, or perhaps one of your drives.

If me, I would pull all but the boot drive and all but one stick of RAM and see what happens. If good, swap RAM, or add one stick at a time until you work your way through all the sticks. If still bad, I would look at graphics.

 

Hey guys, thanks for the help! Turns out it was my old 40GB SATA HDD. I haven't even been using it for anything because it never gets detected by my computer, this used to be my system drive on my old setup, on which I was planning to dual boot Ubuntu. But Ubuntu wouldn't install and I just forgot about it, and left it sitting there screwing up my POST.

Thanks everyone!

 

Interesting. I am glad you got it sorted out and thanks for posting the followup.