Strange "hiccups" on cold boot

When I power on the laptop, it sometimes "hiccups" 2-6 times... by this I mean the hard drive light blinks, the DVD drive motor grinds (drive seek), then I hear a slight "pop" from the speakers as if they were powered off and on very fast, then it repeats. If I wait long enough, eventually I'll see the POST screen. It's done this from the first time I got it (mid-February), but it SEEMS to be getting more common. I don't ALWAYS get this behavior - sometimes it goes right into the post screen. I'm just curious if others have seen this behavior, and if there's a self-help fix for it.

There's other weirdness - WinXP reports that I have a "Standard IDE Controller" and a "VIA IDE Controller"... the hard drive (I only have one) is attached to the "Standard" controller primary, and the DVD drive is on the VIA secondary (I might have that backwards - DVD on standard and HD on VIA, but the point is the HD is primary on one and the DVD drive is secondary on the other). Is this the SATA controller vs. the regular IDE controller? Just curious.

One thing that's gotten me concerned and might be related is the DVD burner - Even when burning ISOs, I have heard/seen the drive spin down and back up. When burning data files to disc, I've seen the drives read buffer go from 98% full to 5% and stay there for several seconds (sometimes accompanied by a spin down/spin up) while the Nero buffer stays at 100%. Being a little paranoid, I've started using the option to validate the data after the burn, and until recently have only had one failure though I do burn at least 1-2 discs a week, some CD some DVD depending on what I'm backing up. In the past couple of days, I've been trying to burn a DVD of LOTS of home movies - this is something I've successfully done before, using this laptop. I have created the VIDEO_TS folder and am using Nero to burn it. I burn at 4X, and turn on validation. Data validation has failed 3 times in a row so far. Fourth time was left validating as I left for work this morning, don't know if it worked this time.

Am I having a drive issue?

Actually, that's what I mentioned in the article... the HD is primary on one controller, and the DVD drive is secondary on the OTHER controller, though the HD is SATA, not IDE (or at least I didn't think I had an IDE option when I purchased it)... I purchased the laptop at the beginning of the year from PCTorque and I haven't messed with the physical configuration of the hardware at all.

I did find another strange thing while examining the BIOS. I found the option to switch to 12 hour time on the front LCD display rather than 24 hour time and decided to do that - seemed like a safe option to twiddle... the clock then told me it was 39:XX (where XX was the minute, not literally what it displayed). I switched back to 24 hour time and it displayed the corrent time again.

Ok, I've sorted the drive issue out in my head, and realize I also described it poorly above. The hard drive is the master drive on the primary channel of the "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller"... should that be a more specific SATA driver? The DVD drive is the master drive on the secondary channel of the "VIA Bus Master IDE Controller". This was just a weirdness that, if I had thought about more, I wouldn't have mentioned in the post above... but it doesn't change the problem I have currently.

My biggest issue is the "hiccups"... I'm wondering if they're indicative of a hardware problem, since they show up pre-post... like maybe the drive seek/test is occasionally failing several times before it actually works - I'm pulling stuff out of thin air here, because I've been out of the hardware side of things for too long now. All I know is that anything that happens differently during the power on sequence, especially something that differs each time (the number of times I hear the DVD drive motor grind), can be a cause for concern... I'm mainly wondering if any other users see this and if I should look at RMAing the computer, since it is still under warranty.

I assume that no one else sees this behavior? If not, I'd love to know - that would indicate that I should see about sending the laptop in.