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Enabling the Intel® Rapid BIOS Boot will give you the most benefit in reducing your boot time, but there are additional steps for those who want the fastest boot times available.
One of these steps is to change your boot order. By default, the BIOS boot order is floppy drive, then hard drive, then CD-ROM, then network. When you boot the PC, it will search for a bootable disk starting with the first device and progressing until it finds one. Most of the time, you will want to boot from the hard drive, however the system will check the floppy drive first. By changing the boot order to hard drive first, you can eliminate the time it takes to search for bootable drives -- this will reduce the overall boot time. Keep in mind that the boot order will have to be changed if you do want to boot from a floppy or CD-ROM.
CD-ROM and Network Boot
Booting from CD-ROM is supported in compliance to the El Torito bootable CD-ROM format specification. Under the Boot menu in the BIOS Setup program, ATAPI CD-ROM is listed as a boot device. Boot devices are defined in priority order. Accordingly, if there is not a bootable CD in the CD-ROM drive, the system will attempt to boot from the next defined drive. The network can be selected as a boot device. This selection allows booting from the onboard LAN or a network add-in card with a remote boot ROM installed.
Fast Booting Systems with Intel® Rapid BIOS Boot
Three factors affect system boot speed:
- Selecting and configuring peripherals properly
- Using an optimized BIOS, such as the Intel® Rapid BIOS
- Selecting a compatible operating system
Peripheral Selection and Configuration
The following techniques help improve system boot speed:
- Choose a hard drive with parameters such as "power-up to data ready" less than eight seconds to minimize hard drive startup delays.
- Select a CD-ROM drive with a fast initialization rate. This rate can influence POST execution time.
- Eliminate unnecessary add-in adapter features, such as logo displays, screen repaints, or mode changes in POST. These features may add time to the boot process.
- Try different monitors. Some monitors initialize and communicate with the BIOS more quickly, which enables the system to boot more quickly.
Intel® Rapid BIOS Boot
Use of the following BIOS Setup program settings reduces the POST execution time. In the Boot Menu:
- Set the hard disk drive as the first boot device. As a result, the POST will not first seek a diskette drive, which saves about one second from the POST execution time.
- Disable Silent Boot, which eliminates display of the logo splash screen. This could save several seconds of painting complex graphic images and changing video modes.
- Enable Intel® Rapid BIOS Boot. This feature bypasses memory count and the search for a diskette drive.
In the Peripheral Configuration submenu, disable the LAN device if it will not be used. This can reduce up to four seconds of option ROM boot time.
NOTE
It is possible to optimize the boot process to the point where the system boots so quickly that the Intel logo screen (or a custom logo splash screen) will not be seen. Monitors and hard disk drives with minimum initialization times can also contribute to a boot time that might be so fast that necessary logo screens and POST messages cannot be seen.
This boot time may be so fast that some drives might be not be initialized at all. If this condition should occur, it is possible to introduce a programmable delay ranging from 3 to 30 seconds (using the Hard Disk Pre-Delay feature of the Advanced Menu in the IDE Configuration Submenu of the BIOS Setup program).
For more information, review the Technical Product Specification for your Intel® Desktop Board.
This applies to:
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