mobo hell please help

M

meanman

Active Member
hi the other day i updated my bios using the abit flash utility and after it had finished i rebooted and the first error was a checksum but i know what that is the second error was no o/s press ctr alt and del to reboot, i went into bios and my sata drive with windows image was not desplayed only my 2 ide drives that i use for backups were there, so i disabled the 2 pata drives and tried again and this time it booted up fine, under my computer all the hdds were there and working good even though the 2 pata drives are disabled in bios.
now when i have to restart the pc it boots straight back up fine but if i turn the pc off the next time i boot it up it says no bios installed so i restart and then the pc boots fine, sorryu for the long post but any help would be great thanks.
ps i rolled the bios back to the previouse one and the problem is still there.
 
Evidently and typically seen the sata controllers are disabled by default. The update simply restored the default settings. Your bios may be set by default to array instead of stand alone master. Since these are each sata masters and are normally seen as separate logical drives you will have to review those settings in the hardware configuration section of the bios. Refer to the board's manual if you have any problem with settings there.
 
thanks pc eye i have disabled sata raid in the bios and that has worked my only other issue is , i have 2 pata drives installed one master one slave and i have 1 sata drive installed with windows on it i have had to click on both the pata drives in bios and were it says auto detect i have had to put it on none so they are no longer seen in the bios or post screen now the sata drive is recognized and windows boots fine ,the 2 pata drives are still visable under my computer and can be used, if i allow the bios to auto detect them the sata drive disappears and i cant boot to windows it just seems a bit odd.
 
The one thing often found in the hardware configuration section depending make and model board is the list of drives installed and the ability to move any particular one to the top of the list to make it the default drive. The bios will then to that drive alone for the OS to load once you assign any drive ide or sata as the first at the top there. The main problem of course with having the OS on a sata is that the ide controller will override the sata by default. That's the nature of boards there.

Originally ide drive were the host while SCSI and later sata drives offered faster storage capacity with addon controller cards on the old systems. More and more people found they could OS them and use the faster busses for the OS as well as speeding up data access. The Vista installer will automatically look for the first ide drive on a system despite being installed to a second ide or sata if there's a working partition found. The boot folder and boot loader will automatically be copied there.

With the new build here Vista will see a reinstall on the then first ide while XP will be on the large first of two sata drives. Each will be set up as stand alone and later see each version of Windows install the other drive to have access to it. Gradually ide drives are getting pushed aside by sata with most new boards seeing only one ide controller. When you have two ide optical drives where does an ide hard drive go then without a controller card added in?

With the Dell and Windows seen on the sata I would advise leaving the sata side enabled and use the ide drives for backup and storage purposes. The options on the board they used for that model seem a little limited. Plus you already decided to have the sata as the primary OS drive. As long as you still have full access to the other drives you are in good shape. For dual booting? I think you be looking at a second sata to avoid the problems you have been seeing plus have drives to pass along to a new system eventually.
 
Go through the system's user manual anyways to follow the information there. That should readily show the various sections and settings in that board's bios. Dell, HP, and other prebuilds usually have an online FaQ section for review and troubleshooting with questions and answers for various things as well. Those are often limited however.
 
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