I have an Aurora R2 bought a few years ago, and recently I decided a RAM update and new Samsung SSD would be good for speed. So now it's super fast, with the exception of booting up. It still takes good 2 minutes to get past the first splash screen on the BIOS, it's only the BIOS, after that it's like lightning.

I've Googled the issue, and the usual problem is the BIOS trying to boot from anything it can, with the fix being to change the boot menu. However I've changed it now, and it's still slow. When I disconnect the USB devices it speeds up, but I can't do that every time I want to boot the PC up!

The only other option I can think of is upgrading the BIOS, however it seems that A04 is the recommended on for Aurora R2s, so I don't know if upgrading the BIOS could cause issues, especially not if it doesn't solve the issue.

Also, when I disable my original hard drive in the boot menu, the PC won't boot up. Despite the Samsung one being fine to boot from, and the original not being needed as far as I know for starting Windows, it gives me an error message and makes me restart the PC, with a new boot configuration (with the original drive as second choice).

Any ideas on how to make the BIOS boot faster? And why I need to have my original drive in the boot menu?