Hard drive issues

[Poink30]

I have kind of an interesting problem. I have been running my system for a while with the following specs:

Athlon XP 3000+
Asus A7n8X Deluxe Bios 1008
Twin Corsair XMS 512 PC 3200
Antec TruePower 430
ATI Radeon 9800 pro
and 1 SATA HD, 3 ATA-100 HDs
Plextor 12x CD-r , Abit DVD-ROM
Promise ATA 100 IDE controller

I originally had the system to boot up off of one of the ATA HDs. They have been making clicking noises recently so I decided to replace my drive that housed the OS. I bought a new seagate S-ATA 300 gig hd and ghosted my old drive onto it. Now the system boots up fine with just the SATA hard drives connected, but when I attempt to connect any of the other ATA HDs, I either get a "NTLDR not found" error or it just hangs before it begins booting windows (Depending on which harddrive i attempt to connect). All of the drives are detected in post and I have attempted to modify my boot order but to no avail. Any ideas?

 

[mechBgon]

Set your system's boot-device order to have "SCSI" first. That's how your particular motherboard views the SATA controller, since it's PCI-based.

 

[Poink30]

Forgot to mention I tried that and it didn't work.

 

[mechBgon]

Try with the Promise ATA card removed. Because it's also a PCI-based disk controller, the motherboard may be looking to it, rather than to your SATA controller, when you specify "SCSI." Typically, the motherboard scans the PCI bus in a certain direction and the first PCI-based disk controller it encounters will be what it tries to boot from, when you specify "SCSI."

If that is the issue, which seems likely, then your options are to get a different motherboard, or get a plug-in PCI SATA card and put it above the PCI ATA/100 card so it's the first one the board finds when scanning its PCI bus, because I don't think Asus has included the option to reverse the direction of the bus scan. At least, my A7N8X Deluxe didn't.

 

[Poink30]

There is a new option in the bios with version 1008 that supposedly allows you to select SATA to boot before SCSI. I have tried using that also, but i get to "Verifying DMI pool" then the system hangs. It does seem to change to direction in which the motherboard scans the PCI bus though, it tries to boot from the SATA, then moves on to the Promise card. I will give removing the ATA a try though. Thanks for your prompt help!

 

[mechBgon]

The other thing coming to mind is that if you happen to have any Western Digital hard drives that have a cable all to themselves, you'll want to set them to Single Drive rather than Master, they're just picky that way and can stall the boot process or even result in a no-POST situation sometimes, depending on the motherboard.

For recent-model WD drives, Single Drive is when the jumper is removed from the pins entirely, btw.