May be tottally off but I vaguely remember running into this before... I think some SCSI cards have a jumper for this problem.. Also, cant you just bring up the boot menu and wait there till it's spinned up? or configure the boot menu to always appear, allowing you to always wait for it to spin up?
Seems to me there is at least 1-2 other fixes as well.. another is you could boot from floppy but configure the floppy to load everything from hd so it isnt slow
