P4M800 board - HD boot sequence not saving to CMOS

[nollonemo]

I have a MachSpeed P4M800 board, purchased in December 2005. Until recently, the board has been working fine.

I recently added an SATA drive to the board.

The board has 2 hard drives on channel 0 (IDE)
One DVD drive (master) and one hard drive (slave) on channel 1 (IDE)
One hard drive on channel 2 (SATA)

The operating system in on the SATA drive.

The default hard drive boots sequence in the BIOS is:
Channel 0 master
Channel 0 slave
Channel 1 slave
Channel 2

When I change the boot sequence in BIOS to have the SATA drive at the top of the list and save the setting to CMOS and reboot, on boot I get an NTLDR message, which tells me the system is attempting to boot from a disk that does not contain the OS.

When I reboot and go back into the bios, what I see is the default sequence, which tells me that the boot sequence I specified was never saved. Note that other bios settings (for example the date and time, and onboard audio disabled) do not return to their default settings. The problem appears to be limited to the hard drive boot sequence.

If I use F9 to go into the boot sequence menu when booting, and specify the SATA drive as the boot drive, they system boots normally.

I have tried clearing the CMOS, and also have tried replacing the CMOS battery. This has not solved the problem.

The problem was not apparent prior to adding the SATA drive, because the OS was previously on the channel 0 master drive, i.e., the default drive at the top of the HD boot sequence.

For system configuration reasons, the OS must be on the SATA drive.

Does anyone have any ideas of how to fix this? (I doubt I'll get any useful information from MachSpeed

 

[nollonemo]

bump

 

[stevty2889]

If you are getting the NTLDR error, it's more likely the OS is corrupted. If it was trying to boot to a drive that doesn't have an OS, it was say invalid system disk. What happens if you disconnect the PATA drive? When you installed windows to the SATA drive, was the PATA drive connected(I've seen this exact error occur when the OS was installed to a SATA drive, while a PATA drive was connected)?

 

[nollonemo]

Insteresting idea, stevty, but....

Note that the SATA OS drive will boot fine when I use the BIOS manual boot-choose menu on startup and choose the SATA drive as my boot drive. So there's no problem with that OS. And on the other drives there are no OS files, and in fact, an OS has never been installed on either of them.

I did have one somewhat related idea that didn't pan out. I realized that the first partition on all my drives is formatted as primary, and I thought that maybe if I changed the partition type first partion on the non-OS drives to logical, they would be ignored (since the bios would only look for OS loader info on a primary partition), and during the boot sequence, the machine would cascade down to the SATA drive at the bottom of the list and boot it (like if you have CD, HD as your boot sequence, if there's no bootable CD, the bios will try to boot from the HD).

SO I changed them (Acronis Disk Director), but all that happened was that instead of getting the "NTLDR not found, press C-A-D to reboot" message, the machine would hang after enterning the boot sequence and I'd end up with a blinking cursor.

Anyway, the main problem, and very wierd thing, is that the boot sequence I specify in the bios (and try to save to it) doesn't "stick." It did once (after 4 or 5 trys), but then I added a removable HD enclosure and drive, and after that, it just won't take.

 

[stevty2889]

Hmm, really does sound like a bios/motherboard issue then. Perhaps there is a bios update available for your board?