Lynn Coffelt said:
Scratching head here. Newly assembled system with two SATA and one PATA
drive. Bios recognizes them all, although each drive's description is
enclosed in parentheses. After setting the BIOS up as best I can, mostly
default settings, when I reboot to format the drives, the POST says it does
not detect any of the drives.
In bios set-up, there is a note about drive descriptions enclosed in
parentheses, (mine are actually brackets), but I can't seem to find anything
to set those drives to active, or to be recognized in POST.
Am I just too dense to be involved here?
Lynn
As Maximus has alluded to, the most probable reason you are having problems
is related to the "boot order" in the bios. There are two subscreens on the
"boot" menu of interest to you here; one is the list of Hard disks, which
you need to prioritize to recognize which drive you will load your OS on,
which will be the actual boot hard drive. Most probably you should just
enable the one drive you will have the system loaded on and the other ones
should be disabled in this screen because they are not bootable since they
don't have the OS installed on them.
Then, look at the boot order screen. Typically, you would want to have the
floppy drive be the 1st in the list of boot devices. Second, you might well
want the CD ROM drive, as long as you are consciencious about not having
bootable CDs in that drive except when you are loading your OS. The third
(or second, if you omit the CD), should be your bootable/intended to be/
system Hard Drive. Most likely you would be intending one of the SATA
drives as the boot drive but of course I have no way of knowing that. When
you ARE loading the OS from a CD, you will of course have to have the boot
order set up to allow booting from the CD, or you won't be able to load your
OS!!!
If you are planning to load the OS to the 1st IDE Master (a PATA drive) this
is probably going to be how the bios sets it up without your alteration. If
you plan to use a SATA drive as the boot/system drive, then you will have to
tell the bios this in the HD boot order plus in the boot device order, or it
won't have a clue about which drive to go to when you start your system and
you will get an error message along the lines of, "please insert a system
disk and hit enter."
Good luck,
ken
