Boot order problem (ASUS P4C800-E Delux)

[Azurine]

I've recently put together a computer with a ASUS P4C800-E Delux motherboard and a 120GB Serial ATA hard-drive. I installed Windows XP on this drive and got things up and running ok. Next I wanted to add two old Parallel ATA drives from my old computer to use for extra storage. With this setup, when I try to boot up it boots to a Parallel ATA drive rather than the Serial ATA drive. I want the Serial ATA drive to be my primary system drive, I don't want it to boot from one of the slower Parallel ATA drives and I'd prefer not to place a boot loader on the Parallel ATA drives. Any suggestions?

 

[mechBgon]

Welcome to the Forums Azurine I might be able to help with that. First of all, your motherboard has two different SATA controllers: one is native to the southbridge itself, and uses the upper pair of SATA jacks on the motherboard. The other one is the PCI-based Promise SATA controller and it handles the lower pair of SATA jacks (see diagram on page 2-2 of your manual). Which controller is your SATA drive running on?

 

[Azurine]

the one labeled SATA1

 

[mechBgon]

Cool Look at page 4-32 of the manual where they're talking about boot-device priority. Can you pick the drive out of the options by either its name or the controller it's running off of? By default, I imagine it looks at the PATA controllers first, so switching that is probably all you need. Good luck, let us know what happens

 

[Azurine]

it gives you three slots to fill for boot order. each slot gives you three options: Floppy, CD-Drive, or whatever hard-drive it chooses for you. From a little trial and error the hard drive it selects seems to follow a few rules. 1) If there are two Parallel ATA drives, choose the master 2) If there is only one Parallel ATA drive, choose it 3) if there are no Parallel ATA drives, choose a Serial ATA drive. This of course is just a result of the experimentation I have performed so far.

 

[mechBgon]

Huh. If you look at page 4-11, they talk about what 'mode' to have the southbridge operate in, and it looks like you would want "Enhanced" mode. Is it in enhanced mode presently? If it already is, jump on down to page 4-20 and see if it's got the Promise controller set to RAID mode. If so, try switching the Promise controller from RAID to IDE mode.

As a separate note, look at page 4-23 where they talk about USB... people have been saying it is a good idea to disable Legacy USB Support, although I forgot what issue it resolves.

Good luck! Also, if you have any stability problems once it's up and running, check your memory timings and memory voltage (instructions in this thread).

 

[Azurine]

I solved my own problem, I apparently wasn't paying attention.

The options for the three slots are of course, Floppy drive, CD drive, and Hard Drive.
The thing I didn't notice is that when you add more than one hard drive a NEW bios option appears...
What the hard-drive boot order is.

I'm all set now, thanks so much for your patience and help, I hope this thread is found to be useful for someone else.

 

[mechBgon]

Thanks for sharing the solution for the next guy Have fun!