A8N-E SATA drive won't boot on cold start

[mopudding]

My new rig consists of these parts:

• Asus A8N-E mobo

• 2GB OCZ DDR 450 RAM

• Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice Core)

• Nvidia 6800GT

• Seagate SATA II 300GB 7200.9

• IBM 60GB IDE Deskstar

• LG 8160B CD/RW

I've updated my BIOS to version 1011.004 (latest version) and set the boot sequence to: floppy, hard drive, optical drive. (I can't find an option to specify which hard drive to boot from--does this option exist?).

All my drives are set to AUTO and are all recoginzed by the BIOS. My SATA drive is plugged into port 1, and the IDE drive is set to Slave on the Primary IDE channel. The CD writer is on the Secondary channel and set to Master.

I should note, that Windows Disk Manger, the IDE drive as Disk 0, and the SATA drive as Disk 1. Windows


My Problems:

1. When I cold boot the computer, the system initially tries to boot from the IDE drive. I then get a no NTLDR error because the IDE drive has no OS on it (just files). Rebooting yields the same results. However, if I set the IDE drive from AUTO to NONE in the BIOS, the computer boots from the SATA drive, and Windows XP recognizes both the SATA partitions and IDE partitions.

1. Also, the IDE drive is deemed 'bad' by Partition Magic 8.01. PM gives me a disk geometry error, and despite deleting my partitions and re-formatting the drive, it still gives this geometry error. Windows Disk Managment sees the drive as OK, and I can still access the files on the drive.

My Questions:

1. Why do I have to hide the IDE drive to get the SATA drive to boot? This seems wrong.

1. How do I solve the disk geometry problem?

Thanks in advance for the advice.

 

[mb103051]

i have the same motherboard too and there is a selection in bios to set the hard drive order to boot from.its in the boot area,im trying to remember where its at.ive set it on mine a number of times.ill post back if i find it.im looking at the manual now.its in boot device priority,you highlite hard drives and all you hard drives show up and you can change the order there in.move the boot drive to the top of the list and hit enter.it shows this in the manual on page2-36 and 2-37.

 

[mopudding]

Alrighty... so I've set my BIOS boot order to go to SATA drive 1st, IDE 2nd. Saved that, rebooted and it worked perfectly.

I shutdown for the night (feeling good that the problem was solved) -- but when I cold booted today, the SATA drive wasn't recognized initially - so I got a non system disk error.

I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, this time the SATA was recognized but still the same system disk error.

I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL again, this time I go into the BIOS to check the boot order and find that it's changed back to boot to IDE first, SATA second. So I switched it back to boot off the SATA and everything works again now.

I've found that cold booting causes the BIOS to forget my boot order and it returns the IDE to boot first.

Any fix for this or is my mobo defective?


thanks!
chris.