BIOS Updates forum

My system was running fine until I upgraded my Bios, now it will not boot to the C partition on my single SATA. It will boot to a back up IDE drive which has a copy of the XP OS mirrored from the SATA drive. And windows explorer can see all 3 partitions in my single SATA drive.
I upgraded to BIOS CI8E1013 from the original after experiencing problems with a new VGA card (It frozeup and caused reboot while playing Second Life). I reinstalled the original BIOS(C18E1006) and still couldn't boot to the SATA. I went back to the new BIOS version.
At the moment my Master IDE is the backup Maxtor with the mirrored boot partition.
the slave is the WD1200JB and my SATA is is just there, visible and accessable from WinExplorer.
BIOS Settings:
In the BIOS settings Maxtor is listed for primary master and the WD1200JB is listed for primary slave.
Raid or SCSI Card Boot-Raid, I tried SCSI to no avail
First Boot-Floppy, I tried SCSI to no avil
Second Boot-HDD-0, I tried SCSI to no avail
Boot Other device- Enabled
At someones advice I took out my CMOS battery overnight, put it back, fixed the BIOS clock and date, set BIOS settings to default. No go.
My new Graphics card still causes reboots from Second Life and I am about to sent it back to Buy.com


Specs:
OS: XPHome SP2
ASUS "A7N8X-E Deluxe" nForce2 Ultra 400 Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket A CPU
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ "Barton", 333 FSB, 512K Cache Processor
New Card: XFX GeForce 7600GS AGP 8X 256MB DDR2
Old Graphhics Card: GeForce FX-5900XT 128MB
CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel
WD Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive(one partition has my XP Home SP2 on it)
WD Caviar SE WD1200JB 120GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive (Data Drive)
AntecTru 430w Power supply
NewestGraphics Driver:91.47
Newest ChipSet Drivers: nForce_5.10_WinXP2K_WHQL_english

I've seen similar problems mentioned in this and other forums, but no one seems to have had a successfully running single SATA boot before running into problems.
Thanks for any help,
AdamP

Load Setup defaults in Bios if you have not alread done after flashing your Bios.
Check you manual - maybe your SATA Controller has to be set to be used as non-RAID controller.

For me it looks like it's a Bios configuration problem, what happens if you disconnect you PATA drives ? Does the SATA Bios comes up on start and post what drives it has found?

I did load the defaults after I flashed. Windows wouldn't load, everything came to a halt with the "Verifying DMI Data Pool Data....Update Success" message. I had my SATA drive connected like it had been before the problems started, and my WD120 was my Primary Slave. I had no drive in the Primary Master position.
There is no mention of a single SATA drive in my manual, nor is there mention of non-RAID configs.
If i disconnect my PATA drives, none(Primary Master) and none(Primary Slave) show up in the BIOS. I don't know what the SATA Bios is. The only mention of SATA during the Boot process is a screen that has text of the make and model of my SATA drive and "press f4 for raid config" in the raid config. there are only set raid, delete raid and resolv conflicts. When I select any of these options, I get a message that I need 2 drives to do whatever.
It does seem to be a Bios configuration problem, since things were working just fine before I did my Bios update. The only mention of SATA in my Bios settings is "Raid or SCSI Card Boot" in the Advanced Bios Features section.

AdamP

Manual for th RAID-controller chip on your motherboard:
http://support.asus.com/technicaldocuments/SiI3112A.pdf

6 Using Hard Drives as Non-RAID
Drives connected to the Silicon Image® RAID connectors do not support non-RAID
function.

So I have absolutely no idea how you managed to get the OS in there in the first place.

Maybe there was a Mod-Bios installed with SATA RAID-Bios replaced by a Bios supporting standard SATA-UDMA functions.
Or the older Bios supported UDMA operations with a switch in Bios setup.

Thanks for the help. I think I will just install my OS on the WD120ATA and use the SATA for storage. The only reason I had the OS on the SATA was that I had purchased it to replace a dying HDD that contained my OS.

Hi folks,

Please forgive my intrusion into this thread but I thought that I would let you know that I've managed to get this working, partly due to ideas that I got from reading your posts.

The system was originally booting from an old IDE drive, with my data on another pair of IDE drives that were set up as a RAID through an Adaptec PCI card. I disconnected the RAID (to protect my data) and then imaged the IDE installation to a new SATA drive.

The system booted fine from the SATA drive but things went awry when I added the RAID back in; it would now only try to boot from the RAID.

I thought that this might be solved by upgrading the BIOS to a later version that had the option to select whether to boot from RAID (i.e. SATA) or SCSI. Sadly, the result was that it started to boot from the SATA drive but then reset (thus going into an infinite loop). Not good!

The trick was to have the SATA drive connected when booting from the PATA drive. This caused the SATA drivers to be installed to the PATA WinXP installation. Only then did I image (for a second time) the boot partition from the PATA drive to the SATA drive.

Much to my surprise, this new image booted straight off. Even better, it carried on working when I hooked the RAID back in. I am now booting from a single SATA drive, with my data on an IDE RAID through the Adaptec PCI card. This might be an unsupported configuration but it works well enough for me to be typing this (now rather long!) post.

Cheers,

Sean

PS: I suspect that what happened here is that the new BIOS caused the SATA to appear to Windows as a different device. Windows had no driver for this device and thus could not continue to boot.

By booting from the PATA drive with the SATA drive connected, under the new BIOS, I caused the Windows installation to include the drivers for the "new" SATA device. Thus, when I created a new image on the SATA drive, the new image included the correct drivers and Windows was able to boot.

Does this make sense?

Cheers,

Sean