I finally figured out what the problem with my slow booting win2k partition was; it all started after installing SP3. The old drivers for my promise controller were incompatible w/ SP3, and thus unhappy. The old drivers were v 1.60 build 33; to get the new ones to work on my computer, I needed to update the bios on my Asus A7V to the latest v1011 (using AsusUpdate since I can't create a bootable floppy). After that, I needed to do 'Have Disk' to force the new promise drivers to install (v 2.00.0 build 39). After rebooting; magic! A nice, fast startup again.

Keywords: win2k win2000 windows sp3 service pack 3 slow boot startup promise asus a7v promise 100 100tx bios