System boot problem with two hard drives

[Nessism]

System boots and runs fine using single SATA hard drive. As soon as I add in a second hard disk, on ATA channel, the system will not boot off the SATA drive anymore.

BIOS indicates all drives are detected although the system is very slow while it's detecting the drives at POST.

Boot sequence is set to Hard Drive 1st with the SATA drive listed as first priority.

Second ATA hard drive is set up as a slave on the primary ATA channel.

SATA hard drive is detected as 3rd Master which seems normal for this board.


System specs: MSI K8N FSR (NVIDA nForce 3 250Gb), A64 processor, WD 74GB SATA hard disk, Segate 160GB ATA hard disk (brand new, non-formated).

Seems like the board wants to boot off the ATA hard disk and doesn't even try to boot of the SATA drive if a ATA drive is detected.


Any ideas???

 

[Navid]

Are you sure that the SATA is before the ATA in the BIOS boot priority list?
I had a simillar problem with my P4P800 deluxe board. The bios would modify the priority list every time I changed the drive setup. So, i have to check and make sure that my sata is first.

 

[Nessism]

Originally posted by: Navid
Are you sure that the SATA is before the ATA in the BIOS boot priority list?
I had a simillar problem with my P4P800 deluxe board. The bios would modify the priority list every time I changed the drive setup. So, i have to check and make sure that my sata is first.

Yes, I'm sure the boot order is the SATA drive first. For some reason the motherboard wants to boot off only the ATA drive.

Ed