A7N8X Deluxe and Removable HDD Problem

[C. Stuart McKendrick, III]

I recently installed an external USB 2.0 hard drive on to my system. It was
working fine until yesterday when I got the famous "NTLDR missing" message.
When I unplug the external drive, it will boot fine, but as you imagine this
is not a sensible workaround. The external drive does not have OS files -
only music and an MS Backup file.

Is there a BIOS setting to have the comp NOT look at the external drive as a
boot volume? Currently only HDD0 and floppy are listed as boot volumes,
withfloppy first, then HDD0. The external drive isn't an option in the bios
directly, but it is "found" by the bios before the SATA controller is. I
took the CD off of the list thinking that it was causing the problem. Could
this be caused by a setting for USB in the BIOS?

The true boot drives are attached to the Silicon Image SATA controller.

A7N8X Deluxe, 1005 BIOS
Athlon XP 2100
1GB PC333 RAM
2 X WD Raptor HHDs (Striped on SATA)
External 80GB WD drive in generic case.
Windows XP
More, but it doesn't apply to this problem.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Stuart

 

[Doug Ramage]

I recently installed an external USB 2.0 hard drive on to my system. It was
working fine until yesterday when I got the famous "NTLDR missing" message.
When I unplug the external drive, it will boot fine, but as you imagine this
is not a sensible workaround. The external drive does not have OS files -
only music and an MS Backup file.

Is there a BIOS setting to have the comp NOT look at the external drive as a
boot volume? Currently only HDD0 and floppy are listed as boot volumes,
withfloppy first, then HDD0. The external drive isn't an option in the bios
directly, but it is "found" by the bios before the SATA controller is. I
took the CD off of the list thinking that it was causing the problem. Could
this be caused by a setting for USB in the BIOS?

The true boot drives are attached to the Silicon Image SATA controller.

A7N8X Deluxe, 1005 BIOS
Athlon XP 2100
1GB PC333 RAM
2 X WD Raptor HHDs (Striped on SATA)
External 80GB WD drive in generic case.
Windows XP
More, but it doesn't apply to this problem.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Stuart

I set my SATA drive as the *only* boot option - i.e. SCSI in the BIOS. Have
you tried this?

 

[C. Stuart McKendrick, III]

Doug,

Thanks for the successful suggestion. Setting the boot drive to SCSI seems
to have done the trick.

Stuart