P4P800 Boot Drive Problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter SpenserJ
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SpenserJ

I have a new P4P800 with a SATA hard drive as my boot disk and an IDE drive
on the Secondary IDE master. My CD/DVD Drive is on the Primary IDE master.
I have no other drives. When I boot up the computer, the BIOS changes the
IDE drive to Drive 1 - Windows XP still boots, but the IDE drive doesn't
show up in Windows. If I reboot, go into the BIOS settings, tell it that
the SATA drive is Drive 1, then exist, it boots fine. But next time I boot,
it boots and WinXP loads, but the IDE drive doesn't show. Is there a
setting I can modify on the IDE drive settings so that it keeps this
identified as the 2nd hard drive? I've got the latest BIOS for the board
(16).

Doug
 
I have a new P4P800 with a SATA hard drive as my boot disk and an IDE drive
on the Secondary IDE master. My CD/DVD Drive is on the Primary IDE master.
I have no other drives. When I boot up the computer, the BIOS changes the
IDE drive to Drive 1 - Windows XP still boots, but the IDE drive doesn't
show up in Windows. If I reboot, go into the BIOS settings, tell it that
the SATA drive is Drive 1, then exist, it boots fine. But next time I boot,
it boots and WinXP loads, but the IDE drive doesn't show. Is there a
setting I can modify on the IDE drive settings so that it keeps this
identified as the 2nd hard drive? I've got the latest BIOS for the board
Click to expand...

Hmmm, big hmmm. Does it make the IDE drive 1, then load XP from the
SATA drive, and all's well, but then when rebooting it reverts to the
old BIOS setting. If so, you might try going back a BIOS. These
settings should be kept. I don't think Windoze can influence BIOS
settings like that, but maybe the boot loader is changed.

Hopefully someone will give us the answers, cause I might want to add
a SATA drive to mine one day too.

One other thing to try might be this. First unplug any USB or CDrom
drives or CF card readers etc from the computer. Boot and change your
IDE to drive one, go to windoze. Check what drives are designated
there. You should have drive C and D if both are single partitioned.
If not, you've got more drive numbers. But windoze should have them
both in the right order too. The boot drive can't be changed after
windoze is installed, but you can designate all other drives to be
whatever letters you want. I found this handy in the past. But the
best way to do it is as I said remove all other devices that take a
drive letter.

After checking that, reboot and see if your problem is solved.

If not, well, I'm out of guesses.

If it's working now add one item at a time rebooting and making sure
windows gets them all in the order you want them. Then you shouldn't
have to designate them in windoze.

A good thing to do during this process, is clean up your devices with
a SAFEMODE boot and removing old hardware not being used anymore. You
can easily add it later in any case.

Most recent stuff does not need special drivers, XP handles most
stuff really well. You should not update drivers until all is working,
then only what is needed, like your video card.

If you find something that upsets everything, maybe causes your old
problem to come back, then you have found perhaps a device problem and
might have to install them in a different order or upgrade it's driver
first thing.

good luck
 
It is odd - WinXP boots evertime, but sometimes the IDE drive doesn't show
in WinXP. So it is clearly a problem with the BIOS identifying
devices/drives during intial bootup - it always finds the SATA drive to
boot, but may or may not show the IDE drive in Windows - the only way to
correct is to go into the BIOS and tell it that the IDE is Drive 2 - for
some reason this BIOS setting changes on its own during initial startup.

I thought I may have read that there are some IDE advanced settings that can
be changed in the BIOS.

The system was built from scratch so there are no old configurations. I
installed XP and made sure all was working before I added the IDE drive.

Doug
 
The first question is what do you get on the POST screen when booting your
system? If you don't have that stupid full screen logo running it will tell
you what drives the systems sees at start-up. Or you could hit the F8 key
early on in the boot process to see if both drives are available.

There is a "Standard" and "Enhanced" setting in the CMOS that can be
selected as well as drive priority choices for your HDs. I have the same
board with 5 internal and one external HD as well as CD burner and a DVD
burner. However have not purchased a SATA drive as of yet so am probably
not the best to answer your question. I will say though that my system has
never lost track of any drives and this is from BIOS versions back in the
single digits (08).

FWIW,
Len
 
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