P4c800-e Deluxe RAID and Bios Amnesia

[paulcalif]

Bios Amnesia

I?ve managed to stump the ASUS tech team, so I?m coming to you to see if anyone else has encountered the problem I?m having. I have the P4C800-e Deluxe motherboard. Best motherboard I've ever had by a long shot, and I've had a bunch. But.... I have 4 Western Digital 120GB 8MB cache drives. These are the P-ATA variety. Two of the drives are connected to the RAID controller and are configured in a RAID 1 array (mirror). The other two are masters on the primary and secondary controllers, one having a DVD burner as a slave, the other a CD Burner as a slave. I have a 2.6 GHz Pent 4 CPU and 512Meg of DDR 3200. The problem is that I set the system to boot from the RAID array and it boots fine, BUT when I re-boot, the setting for which drive to boot from changes every time. I have to go back into the Bios and change the boot order so that the RAID array is set as the first Hard Drive to boot from. This happens without changing any hardware. I spent an hour on the phone with their tech support and ended up with, yea, there is a problem. This is the second motherboard that has had the same issue. The only setting in the BIOs that is changing is the Boot Drive order so a bad battery is not the problem. Note that the primary and secondary drives are in drive caddies and that if I turn them off, the system WILL boot from the RAID array without changing the Bios settings. I don?t expect a solution here, but if anyone has a similar configuration, I?d sure like to hear about it.
Thanks!!

 

[csidd]

Hey paul,

I have the p4c800e d too. My config is as follows:

p4 2.8 800fsb
1gb 3200
primary IDE 80gb maxtor
2nd IDE Lite-on 52x master
NEC DVD 4x slave
Promise RAID has 2 ultra133 160gb 8mb Maxtors in RAID 0 with OS inistalled
9800XT

I've had issues with BIOS not recognizing my array on boot up. Fortunately for me it does'nt happen every time I boot. Other issues are booting up and array not recognized and when I go into the BIOS I do not have the opotion of hard drives in boot section of BIOS. Not sure what the problem is. After trying to reboot and pressing f8 it seems to re appear. My solution is going to be putting my OS on a 36gb sata Raptor and using the Promise controller as IDE for the ultra 133 160's.

This probably is not very helpful but I've had some similar issues, thought you might like to know your not the only one with Promise controller issues.

Just for, kicks have you tried putting your non RAID 120's as slave and master on 2nd IDE cahnnel as when your comp boots it's looking to the primary IDE channel first. Just a thought. Good luck either way.

 

[paulcalif]

Problem may be solved - read this

Thanks for the post. I have been playing around with memory settings after reading some of the other posts here. When I pushed the memory too far, I would go back into the bios and find that there were NO options for Boot drive, the pop up selection window was empty. Found that if I arrowed up all the drives were listed, but none selectable! This was really weird. I reset to default settings and everything came back as before - still losing the setting after every reboot for boot drive.


BUT, one of the common posts here is to dis-able the Legacy USB support. I think that is the only setting I changed that I have not changed before. Now the drives seem to be working as they are supposed to, not positive if the USB lagacy support had anything to do with it or not but I think it probably did. I should have mentioned that I have a multicard memory stick reader installed as well. I suppose to find out I will have to re-enable it and do some reboots. Not real anxious to do that, but I will and re-post my findings.

I like your idea about putting the two hard drives on the secondary channel, and I think there is a good chance that that would work, but I would rather have each on it's own channel for performance and the way I have my system set up, the cables wouldn't reach.

 

[csidd]

Glad to see some progress. I also have a 6in1 usb2 card reader. I'll have to try disabling legacy usb and see how it works. Keep me posted as to how things work out for you.