Hard drive question

[Ge']

Thanks for the tips, especially Malcolm, because yes, that was the culprit!
I'm lazy and 7.5.3 doesn't have spring-loaded folders, so I put aliases 
of all my important (and big) folders in the Apple menu, including one 
alias of the entire disk. Some experiments show that the time taken 
during startup depends directly on the number of items accessible 
through the hierarchical Apple menu!
I guess this is what happens: Before the Apple menu is ready for 
display, the items in the Apple menu itself are read, plus the 
subfolders and items in there down to the fifth level. If the harddisk 
itself is in there, this amounts to almost as much work as re-creating 
the desktop.

So the bad news is that I can have this easy access, but at the price of 
slow startup; but then the backup battery is gone so I avoid shutting 
down anyway.
The good news is that the harddisk is fine, which I had started to 
doubt. That was on the basis of previous experience. It's a bit of a 
sidetrack, and a bit of a sad story: Recently, I bought an external 1GB 
hard disk on ebay. It was huge in size and weight, but with the internal 
hd being only 325MB, I was happy to get it, and it cost only 15$ or so. 
When I received it, I initialized it and was surprised to find it was 
2GB! I made a backup of my PB500 right away, everything great.
Next day I thought to back up some ZIP disks too, but the drive didn't
mount. HDT toolkit said that the drive was not initialized.
To make the story short, a friendly guy at Seagate finally told me that 
it sometimes happens that a harddisk doesn't 'hold the partition' and in 
such a case, the disk 'needs to be replaced'.

Thanks again!
Ge'
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