boot w/ & w/o Win2K CD

[Guest]

I have one 160G SATA on Abit IS-7 mobo and 120G on a Maxtor IDE extender card. The 120G is used for data storage but used to have an OS but I erased the Windows folder. When booting, if I leave the Win2K CD out of the CDR, the 120G is picked up and the SATA isn't seen, only wants to boot from the 120G. If I leave the CD in the drive, the system boots fine. The system recognizes the CD as bootable and if I don't hit any key when asked if I want to boot from the CD, the system boots fine from the SATA, otherwise w/o the CD, the system ignores the SATA and tries to boot from the 120G drive; wierd. Eventually I want to unload the 120G drive, format it to clean the boot so it doesn't try to boot from it (I don't know if that will solve one problem) but I'm curious about why the CD is acting like a pacifier.

Anyone have any ideas...
Richard

 

[MadDog]

-----Original Message-----
I have one 160G SATA on Abit IS-7 mobo and 120G on a

Maxtor IDE extender card. The 120G is used for data
storage but used to have an OS but I erased the Windows
folder. When booting, if I leave the Win2K CD out of the
CDR, the 120G is picked up and the SATA isn't seen, only
wants to boot from the 120G. If I leave the CD in the
drive, the system boots fine. The system recognizes the
CD as bootable and if I don't hit any key when asked if I
want to boot from the CD, the system boots fine from the
SATA, otherwise w/o the CD, the system ignores the SATA
and tries to boot from the 120G drive; wierd. Eventually
I want to unload the 120G drive, format it to clean the
boot so it doesn't try to boot from it (I don't know if
that will solve one problem) but I'm curious about why the
CD is acting like a pacifier.

Anyone have any ideas...
Richard
.

What does your BIOS say the boot order is ?? Does it have
an option to boot from the SATA drive first ??

MD

 

[Guest]

Sorry for the delay in responding. The BIOS boot order is: CD,HD,Floppy. There is no order to which drive is looked at beyond the order in the BIOS for Channel 0, 1, 2 and 3. Channel 2 & 3 are the SATA channels and there doesn't seem to be anyway I can force the BIOS to order the Channels.