Help with setting up GA-K8NSA MB

I really need some help he
I put an AMD 64 4400+ on this MB. It's got 2 x 512mb Kingston PC3200 ram
and they're set in for dual channel
the one HD is a maxtor 250GB and it's plugged in SATA0.
One DVD burner is the master and a CD is the slave on IDE1.
One HD is plugged into IDE2.

I have one(?) problem and one question:
When booting up after the "DDR Dual Channel Enabled" is displayed, it takes
about 35 seconds before it detects the hard drives. Seems kind of long to
me?
Then, when it displays the "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." it goes right in and
launches windows XP home.
The problem is when I do a warm boot, it hangs at the Verifying DMI....."
for about 90 seconds then I get a :
"Boot from CD/DVD"
"Disk Boot Failure Insert System disk" error message.
Seems like it doesn't recognize the HD. The only way around it is to do a
cold boot.
I went into the bios and set everything to default, nope, didn't help.
In the HARD DISK PRIORITYsetup I changed it to first, second, and third, as
it shows, but not installed, an add on card. Nope, didn't help.
I erased the cmos, nope, didn't help. Removed the battery, nope, didn't
help.
There must be some setting that I overlooked or whatever.

The question I have is: I'm trying to setup the cpu for optimum performance.
I don't do games just Excel and statistical analysis, so overclocking isn't
all that important, but getting the most efficient speed from the cpu/mb is.
In the bios setup is the MB Intelligent Tweaker (MIT). One part of it reads
"DDR Speed = CPU clock speed x CPU/DDR ratio x 2." I'm having a hard time
figuring out what they're saying...Can someone help me?

I tried the "top Performance" but it gave a high pitch whine from the
machine, so I shut it down and reset it to "Load Optimized Defaults."

Thanks for your help, I REALLY appreciate it.

Lloyd Hanning

I use a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP, and had a similar problem when I had the
bios set wrong.

In Integrated peripherals On board H/W ATA/ Raid was Enabled, it
should have been disabled. I use a single hard drive. May be wise to
double check these settings, but do please
note my board is different than yours.

Hope the example helps you

Davy