this is getting really frustrating!

about every 7/10 times i boot my machine (mandrake 9.2/gnome2.4 - i won't get into the hardware) it starts the boot process and gets to the "checking for new hardware" line and goes into messages about 2 drives being removed/disabled for some reason... i think they were sb1 and sb0 or hc1, not sure, and of course i can't get it to do it intentionally so i can see... i usually just choose the "no, or cancel" option and it goes through with the rest of the boot process and seems to be fine... this is just really annoying and it doesn't seem right.

also, just about as often as problem #1, but not clearly related, when i boot the machine up, i get through the boot process and it starts up X, but sometimes it gets stuck... sitting on a screen with an hourglass cursor and never does anything... i've given it 10 minutes before and it still does nothing, so i just reboot the machine and most of the time it doesn't happen again... this is very annoying and very frustrating, and i don't know enough about linux to know what's going on...

please help!