I've set up a new SN95G5v3, Athlon 3500, 2G RAM, 6600GT and... SATA Drive for XP boot, a Samsung Spinpoint 200Gb. Everything runs as expected, beautiful machine, except that on cold or warm boots just after the "Windos XP" sign starts to show, ot freezes for about 20 seconds. No disk activity, no FDD, no CD, no LAN, no nothing.

I can barely see the XP boot sign on the screen as it was just begining to show up.

I tried to different BIOS versions, didn't work. I looked around all BIOS options, especially regarding HDD setup, no luck. I also used bootvis to analize what was delaying the boot activity, and it didn't work... got an error message "Number of phisical drives in trace file is 0"... suggesting some incompatiblilty with the SATA setup.

Anybody has seen this kind of problem? the Shuttle is a wonderful machine, if it just boots at least as fast as my old piece of HW....