BIOS Keeps Changing Boot Order Priority

Only for programmers and BIOS gurus with technical questions.
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Splitster
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Posts: 8
Joined: Sun Sep 22, 2002 5:12 am

I'm posting in this "high-tech" area because if there is a
solution to this problem it ain't going to be simple!

I recently built a desktop with a Gigabyte mobo.

I have several USB and USB + eSATA external hard
drives. The SATA internal drives consist of two in a
RAID 0 configuration. There is only one operating
system installed on the RAID 0 internal drives.

Naturally, I set the RAID 0 drives to boot first in the
main BIOS setup. 99% of the time that's where the boot
begins for most of us. I've got the usual seperate
boot menu that allows you to boot from another device.
On the next reboot it reverts back to the normal boot order.

I found out too late the this mobo randomly changes
the boot order. If one or two external drives are turned
on the boot order will be scrambled. This is beyond
insane because you cannot boot from something that
has no operating system, active partition, etc.

Google turned up a long list of posts on other forums
about this problem. It occurs with other mobo's besides
Gigabyte.

Someone suggested checking out BIOS Overlay's and
bootloader programs.

The only thing I remember about overlay's is that they
were used with an older BIOS that would not recognize
a partition over a certain size. A few years ago hard
drives capacities exploded but a lot of folks had older
mobo's that couldn't "see" these big drives.

Bootloaders or boot managers are usually used when you've
got two or more operating systems installed. Could this
type of program lock my system so it would always boot
from the active partition, even though I have only one
operating system installed? If the BIOS setup is always
scrambling the boot order, I don't see how a boot manager
could resolve this problem.

I've got double backups of everything. I'm willing to try
anything that one of you BIOS gurus might suggest!
Denniss
BIOS Guru
Posts: 3153
Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2002 8:16 pm
Location: Near Hannover (CEBIT) Germany
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Keep only your Raid0 system in the boot order and disable/remove all other entries. You may need to switch "boot from other devices" off, too.
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