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[Firespark]

It's been a while since I last posted outside of the desktop thread, so hopefully my search didn't miss anything about this issue too far back.

I'm spending the day doing some not-really-spring-but-whatever cleaning of my network and attached systems, and the need arose to finish up a FreeNAS build I've been working on slowly in order to transfer files from my old NAS and free up some disks. I had the new box all set up, but I decided the board I had in it was way too overpowered and my parents really need a new machine anyway, so I figured I'd use my nicer spare parts to hook them up. Which brings me to the problem:

The machine that I just set up for them is an Intel D945GTP mobo, Pentium D 3 ghz, DDR2 (4gb, but I think I have a bad stick in there, so 2), some WD 160gb SATA main drive, and all stuffed into some old emachines case that (delightfully) had standard non-oem 100mil-spaced headers for all the front panel stuff. The problem is that, having installed windows 7 on it, the thing posts then waits after post with a blinking cursor for a solid 5-6 minutes before going into Windows boot (which, being a new and reasonably powered machine happens almost instantly).

I haven't got a CLUE why there's such a gap between bios and boot, and the weirdest part is it only seems to happen when windows 7 is the boot OS. As I said, the board (and drive) originally came from my FreeNAS build, and with FreeNAS' bsd install, there was no gap between bios and boot. Smooth as silk the whole way, ~1m from power button press to loaded. I checked everything I could find in the BIOS settings, nothing seemed abnormal. Intel doesn't support the board on win7, but plenty of people run it (I looked to be sure beforehand that I wouldn't be activating my dad's win7 license on a klunker, though I've not run into licensing issues for quite a while.)

Any ideas why Windows 7 might sit with a blinking cursor for 5 minutes before booting?

[snow veil]

This is a stab in the dark, but have you tried removing the stick of RAM that you suspect is faulty?

[Firespark]

Yes, sorry, I should have been clear. And that WAS preventing it from booting, but even before this issue. Sometimes it'd boot and throw a memory error early in the install,more often it'd just roll over dead in the water after post and the monitor would go to sleep. The two matching sticks one of which is dead are gone, so it's now 2gb of verified good memory running dual channel.