Sata drives: boot order
 

Phoenix-Award Bios. 3 SATA drives, 500GB with C: boot sector and 2 x 160gb. No IDE any more, but 1 floppy (yes!)

I am getting occasional BIOS boot order resets. There seems to be no logic in when. I have done the memory card seating, new CMOS batt.

In Bios the drives are Drive0, 500GB, and then the two 160s as 1 and 2. In Bios Hard Drive boot order, , when all is working, SATA Drive 2 M (500gb), Drive 3M, Drive 4M.

When the boot order resets it puts Drive 4M as primary boot and thus requires 'mangling'. There is no boot sector on 4M.

1) Why does the drive designation change between the basic Bios Drive list and Hard Drive boot order ie why does Drive 0 become drive 2M?

2) Is there anything I can do to stop the re-shuffle?

I have just set BIOS to 'Default' setting and await results to see if that will jog its memory.

Not hardwired with jumpers in the wrong place and confusing the poor thing?

Just straight plugged onto SATA ports and I would not then expect the switching? I don't think the jumper pins on the drives had jumpers anyway.

I gather this can be very confusing - I haven't really studied it as I don't have problems, but:

Read Disk drive numbers may not correspond as expected to the SATA channel numbers when you install Windows on a computer that has multiple SATA or RAID disks

and SATA port numbers vs assignemnt of Disk numbers/ - Windows 7 Help Forums

"At the device level, SATA and PATA devices remain completely incompatible - they cannot be interconnected. At the application level, SATA devices can be specified to look and act like PATA devices. Many motherboards offer a "legacy mode" option, which makes SATA drives appear to the OS like PATA drives on a standard controller. This eases OS installation by not requiring a specific driver to be loaded during setup but sacrifices support for some features of SATA and, in general, disables some of the boards' PATA or SATA ports, since the standard PATA controller interface supports only 4 drives. (Often, which ports are disabled is configurable.)"

"Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is an open host controller interface published and used by Intel, which has become a de facto standard. It allows the use of advanced features of SATA such as hotplug and native command queuing (NCQ). If AHCI is not enabled by the motherboard and chipset, SATA controllers typically operate in "IDE emulation" mode, which does not allow access to device features not supported by the ATA/IDE standard."

If AHCI is disabled you may get peculiar disk numbering and a confusing boot order.

Mac

- hrrrmph! You are not wrong...........:) Much appreciate the links. Link1 seems to be related to install, and this problem also happened with XP before I put 7 on.

Link 2 (Dwarf) is closer, but I still have this strange happening that the order is correct on the drive list and wrong on the boot list.

It is a pain having to re-order the boot sequence every now and then, but I can live with it until I find a cure.

Mine did that until I enabled AHCI. It's been fine since.

Turning on AHCI first meant that none of the drives worked: there's another thing that had to be done first (I forget what it was). Once I'd gone to AHCI, there was no way back (fortunately, none was needed).

The only niggle nowadays is that every so often a partition will misbehave and I'll get a message that Drive 7 Section 27 (or some such words, I forget the exact) has done something wrong. I've not found any way of identifying which hard drive or which partition letter it is.

It's been a lot better since I installed the SSD as boot drive. It's a lot faster, and most of the hiccups I used to get don't happen. At first, the SSD wouldn't "appear" on switch-on. That turned out to be something obscure to do with timing: the fix was a power delay to the SSD - it gets its volts a second after power-up and all is well.

I'd guess at either a BIOS issue - try a flash upgrade

or more likely a dodgy SATA connector or lead (or maybe even a bad drive) on the C: drive
try swapping what should be C: to a different SATA port and use a new lead (yes you'll have to rejig the boot order in BIOS)

It's an old BIOS and I am reluctant to flash, and I also think No2 is the likely culprit.

SATA connectors, especially the older ones without the retention clips were quite unreliable
it got so bad we ended up fixing them in with glue guns

Have you checked the BOIS to see what priority the drives show there?

In my system as well as having the boot order ie dvd,stata etc there is a couple of others to show what boot order you want the drives to be in.

SATA connectors, especially the older ones without the retention clips were quite unreliable
it got so bad we ended up fixing them in with glue guns


That's interesting. Re my attempts at cleaning the pins with a diamond file.

the problem with SATA connectors was quite simply that they worked loose, not that the contacts were poor
if you could anchor them down with a small blob of glue they were OK

doing so reduced our DOA rates (virtually all mail order) by a very significant amount

I decided to try and flash a new BIOS just in case, but have discovered the board makers (Winfast) went out of business a while back. Anyone know if anyone/who might have taken over support?

I have been invited to donate $29.99 to some outfit for an 'updated BIOS' but am a little wary!

Suspect its a Foxconn mobo

Look here: http://www.foxconnsupport.com/download.aspx

Mac

:cool:

Winfast was a brand name used by Foxconn for boards intended for small OEM manufacturers and repairers. They weren't really meant for retail sale, though many did leak out. There's usually an equivalent Foxconn model - in fact many are labelled as Foxconn. Should be a model number stencilled on the board Who is asking for the "donation" for the BIOS? Sounds a con

Mac - many thanks - on the case.

James - oh, you know, Google for BIOS for the motherboard, up comes a 'helpful' site telling you it will check for updates, lo and behold, yes, there is one!, all the time the little voice saying "BOAC- you know where this is going, don't you?" but you keep going IN CASE it really is a philanthropic site (ha!) and there it is Join Today

OK, thats a scam two questions first can you see a model number on that board? and maybe a version number second who built the machine? If its an OEM build using SLP Windows activation, flashing the BIOS may lose activation

Board is nf4uk8ac, socket939 Athlon 64. Cannot find that model on Foxcon's site.

I guess I'm stuck with the existing BIOS.

are you sure its not nf4uk8aa-8ekrs or just nf4uk8aa

All I can see is nf4uk8ac. I'll try the UK phone number tomorrow see if they can point me.