• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

BIOS Forgetting Hard Drive Order

G

G88

Junior Member
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.
 
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. 🙂
 
Last edited:
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.
 
G88 said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Might be the SATA controller on the motherboard's southbridge going bad - or maybe even the SATA cable (try swapping that out).
 
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top