VERY strange seagate HDD problem - cannot detect HDD on cold boot, but detects on reboot

[crice]

EDIT:
I fixed the problem! In my BIOS i turned off "quick boot" and now everything is working again. Apparently my drive needs more time to spin up before successful recognition by the BIOS.

Here's my strange problem:

I have a 120gb Seagate HDD that I use for backup storage. I have been using the drive for about 5 months now without a problem. One day I booted it up and realized that BIOS did not detect it. It is currently SECONDARY SLAVE. The strange part is, once I get into winxp, it sees the drive - albeit in PIO ONLY mode instead of DMA. Once I do a reboot (NOT A COMPLETE SHUTDOWN), BIOS sees the drive and it functions normally again - winxp sees the drive as correctly functioning and in DMA mode.

What's strange is that once I start up the computer from a cold boot, go into BIOS, and check what devices are where, BIOS does no see anything in secondary slave at first. Once, I do an "auto detect" it picks up the info on my HDD and it works fine.

I've tried flashing the BIOS and the problem persists. HOWEVER, the drive works fine as secondary MASTER. I swapped my sec. slave and master and the setup works fine. The device that I put into slave (a liteon 811s dvd writer) detects correctly and works fine in windows. I just have no idea why the seagate drive does not detect at first boot.

Here are my specs:
pentium 4 2.4
EliteGroup L4S8A2 mobo latest 1.0E BIOS
PRIMARY MASTER: maxtor 80gb
PRIMARY SLAVE: seagate 80gb
SECONDARY MASTER: liteon 811s
SECONDARY SLAVE: seagate 120gb (problem drive)
OS: WinXP Pro SP1

Please provide any feedback, this is driving me crazy!

 

[fuzzynavel]

power problem???

spinning up all your drives at startup takes a big punch of power....maybe they don't all spin up fully......but when you reboot your drives are already warm and they don't take so much power......try removing one of the other extra drives or are the 2 80gig drive in a raid array?

 

[crice]

The drives are not in RAID.

MAXTOR 80GB is for my OS
SEAGATE 80GB is for backup
SEAGATE 120GB is for games

I will unplug the seagate 80gb and see what happens.

 

[Slikkster]

I'd:

a. clear cmos

b. reseat IDE cable and jumper in on those drives and where they connect to the motherboard. Even though it's been working, check the jumper pin placement.

c. replace that IDE cable altogether.

Edit: you posted your edit as I was typing my reply. I'd still clear the cmos then and then try quick boot option if you'd like.