Windows 98SE boot up problems

[RowerCPU]

I have all of a sudden gotten a massive slowdown in my boot up time. I'm trying to figure out if it's a driver or BIOS problem. I have tried three different BIOSes for my board (Abit KT7-Raid; UL, WZ, now YH), but they all do the same thing. The windows loading screen comes up, then pops back to the list of devices, etc. with the cursor blinking. Then my CD drives try to access who knows what for a couple of minutes, then the OS finally comes up. Any ideas? Here's my total system rundown:

AMD 850 T-bird
Abit KT7-raid (BIOS-YH)
512M generic RAM
30G IBM DTLA ATA100 on ATA100 channel
3D Prophet GTS 32M (driver 7.52)
SBLive
Kingston NIC
Pioneer 105S DVD
Plextor 8432 CDRW
Iomega Zip 100

Thanks for the help!

[OC]

First, make sure you don't have AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS file in the root directory of the C: drive unless you absolutely need them for something. Then use the MSCONFIG utility to customize the boot process. Lots of options here, so check this tutorial:
http://www.techadvice.com/w98/M/MS_CONFIG.htm

The trick to quick Win98 boot times is to have as little load at boot as possible. MSCONFIG lets you easily accomplish that. I know Win98 very well, so if you'd like some offline help feel free to email me.

-OC

[RowerCPU]

overclocked-
Thanks for the reply. I already reformatted my drive and reinstalled Windows. Guess where the problem showed up? Yup, my good old SBLive drivers and my current BIOS don't get along very well. Luckily this is a very common problem so there is a fix for it...a beta BIOS available from VIAHardware.com. This fixed everything, and I'm happy once more.

PS. Be sure when you're in msconfig to remove everything but Systray.exe, unless you have a virus checker or something you absolutely need to have running, his helps a lot too.

[OC]

Yeah - the SBLive drivers are sometimes more trouble than they're worth. Glad you got it all sorted out though. One more tip - whenever I install a new app I reboot whether it asks to or not, and after the reboot I recheck MSCONFIG to see if anything has changed.

-OC