Hello,
I am new to Linux. After having tried several LiveCD distributions, I have decided to stick with Zenwalk for now. I have installed Zenwalk on my harddrive. My machine is quite old. It is a compaq preario 5600T manufactured around 1998. It has PentiumIII 450Mh processor and RAM is 384 MB whihc is the max it can handle. Everything works well excpet the slow booting.

I have the booting process in verbose mode. What I see is that the process is getting stuck in a step which I think is related to my drives.

ata2 Exception mask ......
then it spits out a series of hexadecimal stuff something like as follows.

ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata2.00: cmd a0/01:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x12 data 96 in
res 40/00:02:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2: soft resetting port
ata2.00: configured for UDMA/33
ata2: EH complete

( This is not from my boot process but something I found in another thread and quite similar to what I see in my machine. I still do not know how to capture the boot process messages in a file)

It goes through this three times and then I think it gives up and continues with the booting.

Everything works well after the booting is completed. However the boot process takes about 3-4 minutes which is very long considering that other distributions were very fast. 90 secs or about.

You can run the dmesg command to see the boot messages

I got the actual boot messages from my machine. They are as follows.

ata1: PATA max UDMA/66 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0x14a0 irq 14
ata2: PATA max UDMA/66 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0x14a8 irq 15
ata1.00: ATA-4: QUANTUM FIREBALL CR13.0A, A5U.1400, max UDMA/66
ata1.00: 25429824 sectors, multi 8: LBA
ata1.00: limited to UDMA/33 due to 40-wire cable
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
ata2.00: ATAPI: COMPAQ DVD-ROM GD-5000, 0210, max MWDMA2
ata2.01: ATAPI: Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus 9300, 1.0c, max UDMA/33
ata2.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata2.01: configured for UDMA/33
scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA QUANTUM FIREBALL A5U. PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 25429824 512-byte hardware sectors (13020 MB)
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 25429824 512-byte hardware sectors (13020 MB)
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
scsi 3:0:0:0: CD-ROM COMPAQ DVD-ROM GD-5000 0210 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 14x/40x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
sr 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0
scsi 3:0:1:0: CD-ROM HP CD-Writer+ 9300 1.0c PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
ata2.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata2.01: cmd a0/01:00:00:80:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 dma 128 in
cdb 5a 00 2a 00 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
res 40/00:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.01: status: { DRDY }
ata2: soft resetting link
ata2.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata2.01: configured for UDMA/33
ata2: EH complete
ata2.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata2.01: cmd a0/01:00:00:80:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 dma 128 in
cdb 5a 00 2a 00 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
res 40/00:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.01: status: { DRDY }
ata2: soft resetting link
ata2.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata2.01: configured for UDMA/33
ata2: EH complete
ata2.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata2.01: cmd a0/01:00:00:80:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 dma 128 in
cdb 5a 00 2a 00 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
res 40/00:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.01: status: { DRDY }
ata2: soft resetting link
ata2.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata2.01: configured for UDMA/33
ata2: EH complete
ata2.01: limiting speed to UDMA/25:PIO4
ata2.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata2.01: cmd a0/01:00:00:80:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 dma 128 in
cdb 5a 00 2a 00 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
res 40/00:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.01: status: { DRDY }
ata2: soft resetting link
ata2.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata2.01: configured for UDMA/25
sr1: scsi-1 drive
ata2: EH complete

According to my googling, this is a SMART issue. Seeing as how your machine is about 10 years old (wow, 1998 is that far gone already!?) it could be a failing drive, a failing controller, or some weird bug.

Here's what my searches turned up:
http://linuxgazette.net/135/misc/lg/..._problems.html
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...07.1/2680.html
http://kerneltrap.org/node/7276

Now obviously you can't boot your system, so what I would do is use a working LiveCD, run the smartctl command and see what results you get.