slow bootup problem please help

[Xenos]

Hello all. I am having this annoying issue with my computer. The specs are:

AMD athlon 1 gig cpu
ASUS A7V133 Socket A mobo
KT133A chipset 4 in 1 437's
Radeon 8500 64mb video card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz PCI sound card
512 megs of SDRAM
Windows 98 SE


The only recently I changed im my computer is my modem. Its a Zoom PCI V.92 because my U.S robotics pci faxmodem died on me. Here's the issue. When ever I reboot or shut off my computer and later turn it back on to get to windows, I have a long wait to the desktop. Whenever my computer lists the PCI device listing screen (the one with the primary master, primary slave stuff on it), it sits there for 30 seconds, then goes to the win 98 splash screen. A week ago, my computer only stayed on the pci device listing screen for about 10 seconds maybe. I do not know what is causing that delay...the hard drive I have is about 3 years old though but I don't hear any grinding noises. Could it be my modem causing the delay? Loose connections? Or is it just some device that takes forever to load? I am not sure how to use the bootlog.txt utility and do I really need to use it. Anyone have some ideas why my computer is taking longer?

[FalcomPSX]

Check the conections to your hd. What brand HD is it? try going to their website and running their diagnostic on your hd. Sounds like possibly a bad boot sector. Make sure you don't have a cd in your cdrom drive, sometimes if the bios is looking for a bootable cd if there is ANY cd in there it take a while for it to check it and decide it's not bootable. I have the same MB and have had this problem. Try making your HD your first boot device, see if that helps.