One of the things fixed by BIOS 1017 is that when you change drives in
a swap tray (for rotating backups to various drives in an set of swap
trays), or when you connect SCSI HDs during boot so you can do a DOS
based backup to it ... the new BIOS no longer arbitrarily changes the
order of boot drives.
For some of us, that was quite a problem since occasionally, the BIOS
would decide the new HD should be the "boot drive" and then, since the
swap drive was in reality only a backup HD ... the boot would fail.
Then we would have to go back into BIOS and reset the boot order ...
it was a mess and really needed to be fixed.
Maybe the somewhat longer boot time we are noticing is caused by the
need for the BIOS to accurately sort out the drive array (that is
where mine now pauses) that is connected and not arbitrarily change
things around where the new drive becomes the new "boot" drive.
Just a guess, but judging from where my BIOS pause occurs, it makes
some sense.
I have also found that if I have a Fire Wire cable plugged into the MB
but no device (like my camera) attached to the other end of the Fire
Wire cable ... boot time is MUCH longer.
I have also found that if I have my Sony Memory Stick Flash card in
the USB flash card reader when I boot ... boot time takes almost
forever (not a problem with CF, SD or other cards). Yet, after the
boot, the Sony Mem Stick card and reader slot work just fine.
So go figure.
kda