My new NF4 Ultra won't boot to SATA

[sagejoshua]

I'm so stuck. Here's the message I get:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

The board is an Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra

1. Booted to XP cd, formatted SATA drive, (WD Rapter 74gig), installed XP. When it tries to boot to the hard drive, I get the above message.

Next, I tried Installing the drivers for the SATA controller with f6 in windows install. Still no dice.

Next, I tried flashing to the latest bios. No dice.

I tried unhooking my USB card reader. No go.

The interesting thing is if I boot to the CD, and then choose to boot from 1st hardrive, it works fine. The system runs great. But if I try to boot directly to the hard drive, I get that same dreaded message.

Please help!

-Josh

 

[John]

Check the boot sequence in the bios. I'd set it to floppy, cdrom, sata or scsi and make sure the raptor is the first hdd if you have multiple hdd's.

 

[sagejoshua]

Originally posted by: John
Check the boot sequence in the bios. I'd set it to floppy, cdrom, sata or scsi and make sure the raptor is the first hdd if you have multiple hdd's.

I did that as well, to no avail....

 

[ViRGE]

I had a similar problem once with a Gigabyte board. The only solution was to get a PATA drive.

 

[John]

This is weird. Set the HDD as the first boot device.

1) How many HDD's do you have? In the bios under hard disk boot priority is the raptor the first drive?

** I am the edit King tonight.

 

[ribbon13]

Maybe similar to this?

Boot into the system with your boot cd work around, and check the event viewer.

 

[John]

Ribbon, your link points to a thread with a software issue IMHO.

Since the OP states "The interesting thing is if I boot to the CD, and then choose to boot from 1st hardrive, it works fine. The system runs great." it looks like a hardware issue to me.

However it's late and my thinking cap is falling off.

 

[Kraptor]

Did u remove the floppy from ur A drive? It seems to me that there is a misconfiguration in ur BIOS.

 

[Hyperlite]

Give Epox a call....if they have anyone that speaks english. i'm not trying to be racist or anything, i'm serious. i don't know if they have an office in the united states.

that aside, that is really wierd. my theory is there may be something wrong with the MBR or something, so it gets the mbr off the cd then boots the drive? heck, i dunno...

try going into the recovery console and running chkdsk on the raptor. that has saved my raid arrays several times, believe it or not.

 

[Bozo Galora]

If you boot to CD then HDD and it works - its definitely bios boot order/config because you are bypassing the bios order check routine.

I am not going to download manual just to look at Epox bios, so you are going to have to figure out what is trying to be accessed for boot before SATA - like LAN or USB or IDE or OTHER SATA??

Could also be HDD is spinning up too late for initial detection - but thats PSU related stuff

 

[TimeKeeper]

Does the BIOS detect SATA HD?
if so, change it to LBA, or Auto.

 

[teddyv]

I just built a rig with the same board and a WD Sata boot drive. Boot to Bios and check the following:
1. Standard CMOS Features > SATA 1 = (Your Raptor Drive)
2. Advanced Bios Features > Hard Drive Boot Priority > the first should read "CH 4 M. (Your Raptor Drive)"

FYI - you do NOT need to install the RAID stuff.

 

[sagejoshua]

Hey, I just wanted to let you all know that I figured out the problem. It was the MBR. After wiping the MBR and sector 0 of the raptor, booting to the xp cd, reformatting the raptor, and intstalling xp, the mobo finally accepted it. And now it runs great!!

Thanks for all your input. Especially Hyperlite, who mentioned it could be the MBR.

-Josh