Removable IDE takes over boot duty from SATA

[wheel]

The mainboard is an P4P800 Deluxe, and normally it boots from a WD 36gb
SATA hdd. I have two other hard disks, both IDE, modern drives, one of
which is in a removable drive cage. Every time I change the IDE in or
out, it jumbles the boot disk order; when in, the IDE removable takes
over boot duty. In the bios I can reset so that the SATA is the first
boot disk, but that gets lost the next time the IDE is reintroduced to
the configuration. I have all of the IDE devices set to cable select;
and there is nothing on the SATA that I can adjust that I'm aware of.
The bios has been flashed recently, probably about an month ago.

 

[D R Tester]

What are your boot priorities in the bios, you should put SCSI as the first
device to boot from.

Dom

 

[wheel]

Hi and thanks for responding

Like I said in the original post "In the bios I can reset so that the
SATA is the first boot disk, but that gets lost the next time the IDE is
reintroduced to the configuration."

The entire issue is that the SATA disk gets demoted whenever a new IDE
disk is introduced.

In the bios screen, the very first page lists IDE master/slave for 4 IDE
sets. The sata is listed as Master IDE 3...however the first Master IDE
listed there is the IDE that does not take over boot duties, because I
don't take it out of the system. So, I have to conclude that this first
page of the bios info isn't all that relevant.

The boot page of the bios seems to be the controlling factor. But, the
SATA disk always falls off of the first boot position when the other IDE
is plugged back into the system.

 

[Paul]

Hi and thanks for responding

Like I said in the original post "In the bios I can reset so that the
SATA is the first boot disk, but that gets lost the next time the IDE is
reintroduced to the configuration."

The entire issue is that the SATA disk gets demoted whenever a new IDE
disk is introduced.

In the bios screen, the very first page lists IDE master/slave for 4 IDE
sets. The sata is listed as Master IDE 3...however the first Master IDE
listed there is the IDE that does not take over boot duties, because I
don't take it out of the system. So, I have to conclude that this first
page of the bios info isn't all that relevant.

The boot page of the bios seems to be the controlling factor. But, the
SATA disk always falls off of the first boot position when the other IDE
is plugged back into the system.

Could this be related to [Compatible] versus [Enhanced] mode
for the "Onboard IDE Operate Mode" ? In Enhanced mode, all drives
are bridged off PCI (or the hardware makes it look that way),
whereas in Compatible mode, a SATA drive is made to appear as if
it is sitting on one of the PATA cables. Maybe the demotion
is due to the use of compatible mode or something ?

Just a guess,
Paul

 

[wheel]

Hi, thanks

It's in enhanced mode; the bios note about that is that I should be
using enhanced for winxp.

I guess this is a rare circumstance?

Hi and thanks for responding

Like I said in the original post "In the bios I can reset so that the
SATA is the first boot disk, but that gets lost the next time the IDE is
reintroduced to the configuration."

The entire issue is that the SATA disk gets demoted whenever a new IDE
disk is introduced.

In the bios screen, the very first page lists IDE master/slave for 4 IDE
sets. The sata is listed as Master IDE 3...however the first Master IDE
listed there is the IDE that does not take over boot duties, because I
don't take it out of the system. So, I have to conclude that this first
page of the bios info isn't all that relevant.

The boot page of the bios seems to be the controlling factor. But, the
SATA disk always falls off of the first boot position when the other IDE
is plugged back into the system.

Could this be related to [Compatible] versus [Enhanced] mode
for the "Onboard IDE Operate Mode" ? In Enhanced mode, all drives
are bridged off PCI (or the hardware makes it look that way),
whereas in Compatible mode, a SATA drive is made to appear as if
it is sitting on one of the PATA cables. Maybe the demotion
is due to the use of compatible mode or something ?

Just a guess,
Paul

 

[Paul]

Hi, thanks

It's in enhanced mode; the bios note about that is that I should be
using enhanced for winxp.

I guess this is a rare circumstance?

There is a history of problems of this type with the AMI
BIOS. Plenty of "my drive moved" in the boot order. So this
isn't out of the ordinary. Taking a look at the comments in
the download field for the BIOS files (the "More" button),
1015 is the last BIOS that had a fix for a boot issue.

I would have thought that in Enhanced mode, the SATA would be
in a different "group" than the IDE drives. In Compatible
mode, there would be more room for confusion between the two
types, because SATA are coerced to look like IDE devices.

You could take a look on Abxzone.com (I tried for an hour),
but there is too much stuff to slog through. The search engine
won't identify matching posts down to the post level, and instead
gives you matching threads. A 1000+ post thread takes a long
time to read.

Paul

Hi and thanks for responding

Like I said in the original post "In the bios I can reset so that the
SATA is the first boot disk, but that gets lost the next time the IDE is
reintroduced to the configuration."

The entire issue is that the SATA disk gets demoted whenever a new IDE
disk is introduced.

In the bios screen, the very first page lists IDE master/slave for 4 IDE
sets. The sata is listed as Master IDE 3...however the first Master IDE
listed there is the IDE that does not take over boot duties, because I
don't take it out of the system. So, I have to conclude that this first
page of the bios info isn't all that relevant.

The boot page of the bios seems to be the controlling factor. But, the
SATA disk always falls off of the first boot position when the other IDE
is plugged back into the system.

Could this be related to [Compatible] versus [Enhanced] mode
for the "Onboard IDE Operate Mode" ? In Enhanced mode, all drives
are bridged off PCI (or the hardware makes it look that way),
whereas in Compatible mode, a SATA drive is made to appear as if
it is sitting on one of the PATA cables. Maybe the demotion
is due to the use of compatible mode or something ?

Just a guess,
Paul

What are your boot priorities in the bios, you should put SCSI as the first
device to boot from.

Dom


The mainboard is an P4P800 Deluxe, and normally it boots from a WD 36gb
SATA hdd. I have two other hard disks, both IDE, modern drives, one of
which is in a removable drive cage. Every time I change the IDE in or
out, it jumbles the boot disk order; when in, the IDE removable takes
over boot duty. In the bios I can reset so that the SATA is the first
boot disk, but that gets lost the next time the IDE is reintroduced to
the configuration. I have all of the IDE devices set to cable select;

 

[wheel]

Hmmm I am at 1016. Wonder why this is so hard for them to fix? SATA
isn't exactly new at this point. This throws a major kink into my plans.
As, I guess it not fixable at this point?

 

[Legend]

what urks me with all this Enhanced mode/compatible mode crap is that I
can't use ghost 2003 smoothly.. with ghost 2003 in XP you start the
process in windows and then it automatically boots to dos to complete
the process then bounce back to windows ... enhanced/compatible/
enhanced is what would be ideal according to AMI....
sometimes it works ... often it doesn't

worse still is that If I want to boot from a dos CD to run the Dos
version of ghost, enhanched mode wont load the cd-rom drivers or let me
run the dos programs and compatible mode drops the CD-rom from the
drives list. if ASUS insist on using AMI bios in the future with this
Enhanced/compatible mode then this is tha LAST ASUS BOARD I WILL EVER BUY.

i TOO AM SICK OF THE DRIVE ORDER BEING UNPREDICTABLE

There is a history of problems of this type with the AMI
BIOS. Plenty of "my drive moved" in the boot order. So this
isn't out of the ordinary. Taking a look at the comments in
the download field for the BIOS files (the "More" button),
1015 is the last BIOS that had a fix for a boot issue.

I would have thought that in Enhanced mode, the SATA would be
in a different "group" than the IDE drives. In Compatible
mode, there would be more room for confusion between the two
types, because SATA are coerced to look like IDE devices.

Hi and thanks for responding

Like I said in the original post "In the bios I can reset so that the
SATA is the first boot disk, but that gets lost the next time the IDE is
reintroduced to the configuration."

The entire issue is that the SATA disk gets demoted whenever a new IDE
disk is introduced.

In the bios screen, the very first page lists IDE master/slave for 4 IDE
sets. The sata is listed as Master IDE 3...however the first Master IDE
listed there is the IDE that does not take over boot duties, because I
don't take it out of the system. So, I have to conclude that this first
page of the bios info isn't all that relevant.

The boot page of the bios seems to be the controlling factor. But, the
SATA disk always falls off of the first boot position when the other IDE
is plugged back into the system.

Could this be related to [Compatible] versus [Enhanced] mode
for the "Onboard IDE Operate Mode" ? In Enhanced mode, all drives
are bridged off PCI (or the hardware makes it look that way),
whereas in Compatible mode, a SATA drive is made to appear as if
it is sitting on one of the PATA cables. Maybe the demotion
is due to the use of compatible mode or something ?

 

[wheel]

I just noticed that the IDE CD-RW is also in play; it's supposed to be R
and it's shifted to H. This is a real bummer...

 

[wheel]

I have what I thought of as a "junk" mobo that I use on a spare pc, it's
an elite group (ecs). I think it uses a phoenix bios. Are those better
for my purposes? Supposedly I bought this asus because it was a better
board for my main machine but this crazy drive assignment fiasco is
going to be a problem for me. I might consider swapping things around.

 

[Ken Maltby]

I have what I thought of as a "junk" mobo that I use on a spare pc, it's
an elite group (ecs). I think it uses a phoenix bios. Are those better
for my purposes? Supposedly I bought this asus because it was a better
board for my main machine but this crazy drive assignment fiasco is
going to be a problem for me. I might consider swapping things around.

Some considerations that may help (or may not):

Do you need the removable IDE hard drive to have an "active" partition?

On cable select; what would be the effect of not having a drive attached
to the end connector of the cable to your primary/first IDE controller?
Also,
what if that were not a hard drive but rather an ATAPI device?

Luck;
Ken

 

[wheel]

I'll try those...

 

[wheel]

No, none of that helped. Well, I didn't remove the bootable aspect of
the removable drive but it wouldn't make any difference. I had this:

SATA Disk (listed as IDE 3 always on first page of bios)
IDE1: Master: Removable IDE (with OS) Secondary: CD-RW
IDE2: Master: Fixed IDE (no OS)

If I took out the removable IDE, I couldn't boot; the fixed IDE would
migrate to the top of the hdd boot order. If I reasserted the SATA as
the boot disk, but then inserted the removable IDE, the removable IDE
would migrate to the top of the boot order and the SATA would go to
position 3.

I rearranged many ways, but here is a sample:
SATA Disk
IDE1: Master: Fixed IDE (no OS)
IDE2: Master: Removable IDE (with OS) Secondary: CD-RW

Exactly the same issues would arise. Any IDE disk is automatically
granted priority over the SATA disk, even if it's not bootable.

What a shame. The reason I purchased an ASUS board for my new main
system was the incredible helpfulness of the people on this newsgroup.
However, not even excellent set of peers can overcome incompetent
programming by AMI and stupid business practices by ASUS (using AMI).
This will be the last ASUS mobo I buy, it's too bad I can't return it at
this point.

 

[wheel]

Does anyone know if this issue will repeat if a USB 2 external IDE disk
is added to the system? IE will it rearrange the boot disk order away
from the SATA disk?