J
Jim Lewandowski
I have a 3+ yr old motherboard (GA-7DXE).
After installing a new hard drive (now IDE #0 primary/master) and moving my old HD to IDE
#1 secondary/slave, upon a COLD boot, it won't recognize the 2nd HD but WILL still boot
and Windows WILL see HD #2 but with multi-word DMA 2 (instead of ultra DMA mode 5). On a
warm boot, no problems. I have researched and believe it is spinup times for the OLD
drive that are the cause.
So, my BIOS is the original. After doing my usual exhaustive search, nowhere can I find
anywhere where it explains BIOS upgrades from a FUNCTIONAL standpoint. IOW, if there ARE
ugprades (and there are) for my motherboard, will NEW functionality be introduced (i.e.
new ADVANCED options or something) or is most of the BIOS changes invisible to the
end-user? Are BIOS specific to a board (i.e. 1:1) or are there "groups" of BIOS versions
that work for a subset of a manufacturers motherboards?
I'd like to try to introduce a predelay for this 2nd hard drive but my current
Phoenix/award BIOS F4 (version 4?) does NOT have this option. Is there any likelihood
that upgrading to a later BIOS will introduce any new options like this?
If no to the above, I tried putting HD3 as the primary boot device with HD0 as secondary
boot device order hoping that the BIOS WILL wait for HD3 full spinup until he can detect
that it does NOT have a bootable partition on it.
Any ideas on how to solve this problem of the slow spinup drive not being FULLY recognized
by BIOS prior to booting Windows?
JL
After installing a new hard drive (now IDE #0 primary/master) and moving my old HD to IDE
#1 secondary/slave, upon a COLD boot, it won't recognize the 2nd HD but WILL still boot
and Windows WILL see HD #2 but with multi-word DMA 2 (instead of ultra DMA mode 5). On a
warm boot, no problems. I have researched and believe it is spinup times for the OLD
drive that are the cause.
So, my BIOS is the original. After doing my usual exhaustive search, nowhere can I find
anywhere where it explains BIOS upgrades from a FUNCTIONAL standpoint. IOW, if there ARE
ugprades (and there are) for my motherboard, will NEW functionality be introduced (i.e.
new ADVANCED options or something) or is most of the BIOS changes invisible to the
end-user? Are BIOS specific to a board (i.e. 1:1) or are there "groups" of BIOS versions
that work for a subset of a manufacturers motherboards?
I'd like to try to introduce a predelay for this 2nd hard drive but my current
Phoenix/award BIOS F4 (version 4?) does NOT have this option. Is there any likelihood
that upgrading to a later BIOS will introduce any new options like this?
If no to the above, I tried putting HD3 as the primary boot device with HD0 as secondary
boot device order hoping that the BIOS WILL wait for HD3 full spinup until he can detect
that it does NOT have a bootable partition on it.
Any ideas on how to solve this problem of the slow spinup drive not being FULLY recognized
by BIOS prior to booting Windows?
JL