Boot-up problems with Asus A8N-SLI-Deluxe

[ATLDiver]

Ok, this may be an incredibly dumb question I'm going to ask but it's been driving me crazy for a couple of days. I successfully installed the A8N-SLI-Deluxe pretty much without incident, including installing XP on the SATA drive, but after I got XP loaded and patched I decided to transfer some older IDE drives. I connected two Western Digital IDE-133 drives on the secondary IDE channel by the included ASUS 80-pin IDE cables. Once I did this I can't get XP to boot, in fact after POST and when it should start booting I get a "press any key to reboot" all in caps on the top-left screen. When I disconnect the IDE drives I can boot up normally without incident but re-connect the drives and nothing. I have set the boot order in the BIOS to be CD-ROM and then Hard Drive and under hard drive I have the SATA set but I've got to be missing something. This is my first system with SATA hard drives and I did read in one of the related post that "Removable Devices" are considered to be SATA drives. I didn't try that because I was thinking that would be like a USB/Firewire device so if someone could give me an idea??

Is it as simple as setting Removable Devices second in the boot order after the CD-Rom or do I have a bigger problem? I know the 400W PSU is a little small for the stuff I have in there, the 12v is rated at 24 and according to Asus Probe power is pretty steady. I'll most likely upgrade to a 550+ Fortran or NeoPower pretty soon but I had this PSU from an older machine. At first I thought it might be lack of power but with the IDE drives powered up but disconnected from the IDE channel it boots up fine. Again any thoughts?


Asus A8N-SLI-Deluxe (BIOS 1004)
1 GB Muskin PC3200 DDR
AMD 64 3500+
Antec 400W True Power
Chaintech 6600GT PCI-E
Samsung DVD-RW
Toshiba DVD

 

[CheesePoofs]

Go into the bios, and there should be a place where it asks you to select first boot device. Make sure its set to SATA hard drive, and not ATA hard drive, or PATA hard drive.

Also make sure the jumpers on the drives are set correctly.

 

[ATLDiver]

Ok, under hard drives SATA is listed first then the IDE drives but the boot menu has CD-ROM, Hard Drive and then removal devices.

As for the jumper settings, there is no jumper on the SATA disk but the IDE drives are set as master/slave respectively.

 

[AristoV300]

Well using may Asus board as a reference when you have all of the drives connected, there should be an option to set the hard drive priorities, so set the SATA to the top. Also my board has a setting to ensure that the SATA drive is bootable.

 

[thunderroller]

chk boot device option in bios

 

[ATLDiver]

Ok, I'm missing something here....There's two places to set boot options, in hard drives I have the SATA listed as first. In the boot priority menu I have CD-ROM then Hard Drive then Removable Devices...What am I missing here?

 

[Nickles36]

I just finished building an A8N-SLI System and had an IDE Hardrive issue. I started with a WD80g Sata drive on the black Sata1 Nvidea port on the MB and a Sony cd/rw on the secondary IDE channel to load WinXP,SP2 and all the drivers on the Sata drive with no problems. When I hooked up my WD 60g Backup HD to IDE Primary my system would pause for 2-3 min with a message stating 'detecting IDE Drives'. Finally the bios detected the HD and WinXP started loading.

I heard from someone in this forum if you changed your IDE 'jumper setting' on your HD to the 'slave ' will solve your problem. It worked for me .. Now my system boot's in less than 20 sec ..<<gg>>

 

[runestone]

ATL, have you tried the WD's set to "cable select" jumper for both?

 

[ATLDiver]

Ok, I fixed this issue by setting the boot order to Removable Devices after the CD-ROM. Once I did this and cycled the machine it POST'ed and booted XP correctly so thanks to whoever posted that in another thread. Just to clarify for other people that might experience the same problem, there are TWO places you must set the SATA drive in order to boot from SATA. First is the boot-order menu, make sure removable is set ahead of hard drive and second go into the hard drive list under the boot menu and set the SATA drive as the first disk. Apparently this board and/or BIOS revision (1004) labels SATA drives as removable devices which technically they are.

I hope this helps, I know I was going crazy trying to figure this out but it seems quite a few others are having similar problems. I'm still having that damn annoying CPU fan failed message upon POST, I need to disable the warning or at least the voice warning. The first time I booted with the speakers connected I almost messed my pants, damn that voice is loud!

In an unrelated question have any of you guys that are running 400W PSU started having problems you think is power related? I'm concerned that I may be on the edge of the power question even though Asus Probe is reporting everything normal on voltage. Sooner or later I'll upgrade to a new ATX2.0 550W+ PSU but I'm in no hurry right now unless I start running into problems.

Let me end on a positive note, even at auto/stock levels this MB and processor (3500+) is FAST! XP bootup takes a mere 29 seconds and editing RAW photos in Photoshop CS is no sweat for this system.