successful A8N-SLI Build except for booting sequence

[mrscintilla]

Got it up and running fairly painlessly with the following config. no OC yet. but seems stable.
enermax eg465p-ve-24pin, 2 512 kingston hyperx, 1 maxtor 300gb SATA, 1 wd 120Gb IDE and 1 seagate 80gb IDE, 1 benq 16x dvd-rw, 1 zalman 7700-alcu, 1 x300 128-bit card. the chipset fan is loud enough to be annoying!!! buyers beaware.

BUT, here is the wierd thing. I can only boot to the maxtor sata drive when I put CDROM followed by that HARDDRIVE in the booting sequence in BIOS. then upon boot don't press "any key to boot from CD." If I put harddrive first, it would boot saying disk failure.

I've updated to the newest 1003-0006 bios. same thing. any obviosu things I missed.

 

[runestone]

What port is the maxtor plugged into, the nvidia(black)?

 

[mrscintilla]

yes SATA3 black, the non-raid one.
How does that affect booting sequence>?

 

[FastEddie]

What ide channel do you have the cdrom device on, Primary or Secondary?

 

[mrscintilla]

Secondary Slave....

Primary IDE=WD 120GB;
Secondary IDE Master= 80GB;
Secondary IDE Slave = CDROM;

SATA3 non-raid Maxtor 300GB

 

[FastEddie]

A quirk---the bios still likes to boot from the primary ide channel when multiple drives are installed. The Maxtor on sata3 is your boot drive I take it. Do you get the same when the WinXP cd isn't in the cd drive when booting? You shouldn't even get the "press any key" message without the disk in the drive.

 

[mrscintilla]

u r onto something. my maxtor sata is supposed to be boot but the drive letter is e and the wd ide is nonboot but has letter c.

 

[FastEddie]

You can further define your boot devices in the bios, in Boot Menue/Hard Disk Drives, where you can move a drive up or down in the list to set its priority.

 

[mrscintilla]

I knew that already. I am reinstalling XP. This time with only the 300gb sata drive in sata3, and of course te CD-ROm in IDE.
Strangely, as always, the XP cd only sees about 130G of the 300G.

 

[FastEddie]

But you just use the Maxtor Large Disk utility to enable the rest of the storage space on the drive after you have the os installed, to have the remainder available.

 

[mrscintilla]

Okay after I reinstalled XP with just CDROM and SATA3, it now can boot direcxtly to hard drive. I consider the problem 99% solved. Lesson learend, when installing a new xp on a SATA drive, disconnect IDE hard drives!!

Now, I will have to do the large disk thing with Maxtor utility and reconnect IDE drives. hopefully they won't create new problems.
Thanks, FastEddie and others. This board is excellent.

 

[FastEddie]

The quirk is why I always instruct to install all cdrom devices to the Secondary Channel, even if you have no devices to put on the primary. It just saves having to work around that one small issue. Gets some games installed on that box now.