Also, how is it plugged up to the motherboard? On it's own in one IDE connector on the motherboard, or is it on the same IDE cable as another drive is?
what its doing behind that loading screen is checking the hardware and it is obviously getting stuck on the cd drive try the drive in another system and see if it works.
if it does the same thing in another system then obviously the drive is faulty no drive should slow the boot sequence down that much and therefore it has to be faulty there is no other alternative. you may need to buy a new CD drive. Nothing in the bios would help much eather if it does it in 2 machines.