The garbled text is the NewIcon. If you don't use NewIcons there are tools on aminet like killnewicon that will sweep your drive and delete those garbled tooltypes (which can amount to significant space savings if hard drive storage is tight).
This 4MB fast RAM you have - is it part of your IDE controller? It may be that the memory is not contiguous, but even with preload off, it shouldn't take as long to load as you're saying (edit: yes, actually could take 2 mins).