asim, first we need to know wat type of HDD are we talking bout here, and when was it bought? wat is its RPM, if u cud provide me with these answers. wud be easy
anyway, first of all if it is a old hdd, format it at a low level or atleast do a full format, remove all the partitions and create again. and in case the detection of the HDD itself is taking much time, i suggest u change the ide cable, use the ATA cables, instead of the IDE ones, the difference is that, the ATA cable has 64 conductors for its 64 pins, while the IDE has 32 conductrs for the 64 pins, so this speeds up ur data transter a lot.
also try putting sepeate cables for both cdrom and hdd..
lets see u try them out..and GL