I replaced a flakey ABIT motherboard with an ASUS A7V8X-X. Nothing
heavy, just unplug everything at the motherboard, lift it out, move
Duron 950 (dont laugh) and memory to new motherboard, drop in new
motherboard and plug everything back in, omitting cards that provided
functions now built in to the new motherboard. Runs great except for
one minor detail.

When it boots, the Bios drive list correctly reports the primary
master (Maxtor 6L040J2), Secondary master (AOPEN CDROM), Secondary
slave (Yamaha CD-RW). However, the primary slave (WDC AC33200L), which
was working perfectly before the upgrade, shows as 'NONE' and is
(naturally) not accessible to WinME.

Strange thing is, I can go into the bios and look at disk parameters.
It shows the slave correctly, manufacturer, model number, geometry,
everything. I save the settings and boot - slave is missing from the
drive list. I have tried it with type set to 'AUTO' and 'USER' with
the geometry reported by the Bios, cold boot, hot boot. I even
verified jumpers and changed the cable thinking I might have upset
something in the upgrade.

I dual boot the system and WIN2K can access the drive even though the
bios says it's not there. That tells me the drive is hooked up OK.
Just for some strange reason, the Bios doesn't see the drive at boot
time.

What would cause a slave drive to be invisible during bootup but
visible to autodetect and Win2K?
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BC Berry <nobody@spamcop.net> writes:
What's the partitioning look like on that secondary slave? Reason I
ask is that there are some limitations on where you can stick an OS on
the disk with respect ot partitioning and expect it to be seen by the
BIOS. I have faint recollections of these limitations back when I was
playing with RedHate Linux 5.x several years ago.

Is this new or used mobo (i.e. may be flakey bios NVRAM).

I'd change the drive position and see if that secondary slave position
always gets "forgotten" by the bios.

--
Todd H.
http://www.toddh.net/

On 31 Dec 2003 17:45:48 -0600, comphelp@toddh.net (Todd H.) wrote:

Thanks for the fast reply!

It is partitioned with a single FAT32 partition as it is a data
backup/temp storage disk for WimME programs. All OS files are on the
primary master drive.

It is a new MB.

I'll try swapping master & slave soon as I can get back to the PC.
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On 31 Dec 2003 17:45:48 -0600, comphelp@toddh.net (Todd H.) wrote:

I found it. I unplugged the PC, cleared CMOS and selected default
parameters. After that, it reports the drive correctly but says it has
failed. WD diags return a SMART error. Apparently, the failure wasn't
fatal (yet) and old motherboard let it ride where the new MB 'fails'
the drive. Then some setting in the CMOS caused the drive to be
reported as 'NONE' instead of failed. Looks like I'll be hunting
another drive.

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