BIOS Forgetting Hard Drive Order

[G88]

My BIOS keeps forgetting the order of my hard drives. I have 1 SATA drive and 2 IDE hard drives. The SATA drive has the OS on it. I have this set as the 1st hard drive followed by the the others. However after a couple of days the BIOS puts the IDE hard drives first and the SATA drive last. Because of this I get an "error loading operating system". Once I go back into BIOS and rearrange the order everything works again. This happens randomly and the BIOS only forgets this setting, all other settings are kept.

I have already replaced the CMOS battery because I thought that was the original cause, but it is still happening.

 

[Harvey]

I saw this when I was working on a friend's Asus board. Don't know if it follows to others.

For the particular board, I disconnected all drives except the boot drive and booted to it. Then, I reconnected the other drives and rebooted, and all was well. The board seems to remember which drive it last booted to.

I don't recall for sure but you may just have to boot to the CMOS for this to work.

Hope that helps.

 

[G88]

The board in the computer is an Asus. I will try this out.

Thanks.

 

[G88]

Today I turned on my computer and the SATA hard drive is no longer listed in BIOS.

Do you think maybe the drive is going bad? It is over 5 years old.

 

[RebateMonger]

Today I turned on my computer and the SATA hard drive is no longer listed in BIOS.

Do you think maybe the drive is going bad? It is over 5 years old.

While drives can fail at any age, five years could be getting towards its end-of-life.

Your first-mentioned BIOS-order symptoms are certainly unusual and a failing disk could explain some things.

 

[xd_1771]

Might be the SATA controller on the motherboard's southbridge going bad - or maybe even the SATA cable (try swapping that out).

 

[nboy22]

Just want to also chime in and say it could be a power connector that got too stressed. I've seen some tightly fitted builds that have no space for power cables and it tends to stress the cables. I had one hard drive disappearing because it was losing power and I've seen one other case like this.