Intel 845PE Bios Trouble

[Ninepepper]

What would cause the Bios to fail to recognize the secondary IDE devices on boot-up? Windows XP detects them fine and they operate normally but they are "missing" from my bios. I am trying to track this down because i want to be able to my CD Rom as a boot device if ever needed in the future. On boot up the bios recognizes my two hard drives attached to the primary IDE drive, and my 3.5 Floppy, but not my CD-Rom nor DVD attached to the secondary IDE Channel. Under advanced-->IDE Configuration it lists 'Secondary IDE Master [not detected] and Secondary IDE Slave [not detected]"

I searched Intel's site for any known issues and there does not appear to be any. Anyone else have any suggestions I could look at? Why can Windows detect the device, but not the bios, it is usually the other way around!

From Belarc:

Board: Intel Corporation D845PEBT2 AAC12587-403
Bus Clock: 133 megahertz
BIOS: Intel Corp. BT84520A.86A.0015.P06.0211131443


not using SATA and not using RAID
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1 (build 2600)

PIONEER DVD-ROM DVD-114 [CD-ROM drive]
TEAC CD-W54E [CD-ROM drive]
73.83 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
26.90 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

 

[Storm]

Did you try upgrading the bios? My guess is the secondary IDE controller is not fully busted but damaged enough not to be detected in the bios.

If you have a second computer try putting both your cdrom and dvd drive on the secondary IDE controller and see if they detect in both the bios and windows. I only suggest this to make sure there's nothing wrong with your cdrom or dvd drives.

 

[Ninepepper]

Thank you for your reply.

I was hoping to avoid pulling the 'puter apart because of its location. The wife bought me one of those corner desks that makes getting the tower out a chore. Anyway, I may have to because while I did not update the bios to cause this problem, I might have reconnected the IDE ribbon improperly. When I placed the computer in the desk, I had to rotate my DVD ROM 'up' one bay on my tower. I might have plugged it back into the connection that had previously been assigned to the CD rewriteable.

I didn't change any master/slave configurations on the drives themselves, but it seems that I read on the web somewhere that it might be the problem. I posted my question before breaking open the case because it just seemed ODD that the bios didn't recognize the connection on boot up, but it ran fine once XP loaded. Oh well, thanks again.

 

[Ninepepper]

Update:

Pulled the tower out and tried every different combination of master/slave/cable select with my Cd Rom and Dvd. No dice getting them to work together. I did notice if I unhooked the dvd rom (slave), the Cd rom (master) would show in the Bios. I have the most recent revision of the bios. I didn't change anything in the bios prior to the drive's dissaperance on boot up. I just can't figure why they are invisible to the bios but XP has no problems finding/configuring/using my secondary ide devices