I dont know what the heck happened... but here's what it is doing now.. this is almost a new system (just a couple months old now Dimension/XPS 9200 Core2Duo with 3GB RAM)

 

when I turn it on, it shows the dell logo, the progress bar moves quickly then the screen turns black and there is a blinking cursor in the top left corner of the screen... then it just SITS here for about 10 minutes then it finally starts to boot... this never happened before, it just started today, before it would go from POST to the windows desktop in about 30 seconds... now its taking about 12 minutes! The whole problem started when I went to upgrade the hard drive, I took out the old one and put in a new 160GB (larger) hard drive SATA, turned it on and put the windows recovery disc in, it went into the setup, i selected the drive in the select drive window (this is vista) clicked next it showd a yellow warrning arrow on the screen and said Can not use the selected drive there is no active something or other I cant remember exactly, I cant even get to that point now... but after it said that I restarted the system, put in the old drive tried it again, same error! but after I changed the BIOS settings for the SATA operation from RAID to ATA/Raid select the other problem started, thats when it just started to sit there forever! so i changed it back to RAID if available, and still does it! I flashed the BIOS to the latest firmware version, and still does it... cleared the CMOS RAM and such with the jumpers on the motherboard... no change.... anyone have any idea what happened or what to look for? thanks!