P4C800-E BIOS Flaky?

[Bill Anderson]

I've been dealing with my new P4C800E Deluxe mbo for about a week and a
half, setting up a dual-boot system, learning the intracies of S-ATA,
flashing to ver. 1019, etc. etc.

I boot both OS's from an 80-gig WD S-ATA drive. On the primary IDE
channel I have two physical WD hard disk drives. On the secondary IDE
channel I have a Plextor DVD-RW +RW (master) and a Pioneer DVD-RW (slave).

Early on I discovered that when I set the BIOS to boot from the Plextor,
it wouldn't work. It was as though the Plextor wasn't there. But I
could set BIOS to boot from the Pioneer and things worked fine. I've
been doing it that way for a week.

Now tonight I tried to boot from the Pioneer and the BIOS just skipped
over the drive every time. When I checked the BIOS I saw that no slave
drive was found on the secondary IDE channel. In BIOS I highlighted the
empty spot where the Pioneer should have been and hit return and voila,
the system found a "new" drive. Please reboot, it said.

So I rebooted and the computer still wouldn't boot from the Pioneer. So
I went back to BIOS and set the Plextor to be the boot CD drive. Never
worked before, but it's working now.

Weird. Flaky. Or am I missing something?

Bill Anderson

 

[Noozer]

So I rebooted and the computer still wouldn't boot from the Pioneer. So
I went back to BIOS and set the Plextor to be the boot CD drive. Never
worked before, but it's working now.

Using "CS" as the designation for your drives (Cable select) instead of
Master/Slave?

Bad cables

???

Just a guess.

 

[John]

Try a different IDE cable

 

[Bill Anderson]

Try a different IDE cable

I shall. Thanks for the suggestion.

Bill Anderson

 

[Bill Anderson]

Using "CS" as the designation for your drives (Cable select) instead of
Master/Slave?
Nope.


Bad cables

Possibly. I'm using the new cable that came with the Plextor drive.
It's standard IDE. I'll try a cable-select cable and see if that makes
a difference. Thanks!

Bill Anderson