SATA drive not detecting on cold boot

[micronet]

Hi,

This is my first post on the forum, so go easy with me.

I have just built a new machine all seemed ok, but I have discovered the BIOS doesn't detect the Segate ST3808110AS SATA drive after a cold boot. If I hit reset or Cntrl ALT Del it boots normally, but not from a first cold boot.

At a cold boot the Bios seems to be looking for quite a while, gives up & reports no Boot drive press any key. If I ctrl alt delete all is fine and Windows XP boots normally. I can restart Windows, all is ok. If I do a complete shutdown and power up it sits for quite a while then reports no boot drive found.

The motherboard is a Gigabyte K8VM800M rev 2.0. I have flashed the BIOS to the latest version (RD), no difference. I have looked under advanced settings for a timing function for the HDD to try extending the detection time, there is none. The SATA setting is set to IDE not RAID. I have tried using Failsafe settings, no good.

I inserted a link on the Seagate drive to slow it from 3GB/s to 1.5GB/s still no good.

I've run out of ideas, can any one help? Any response or ideas would be much appreciated.

 

[Nodsu]

In BIOS, you should have an option to set a delay before detecting hard drives - this will give your SATA enough time to spin up and respond to BIOS probes.

If you can't find that option, then just disable quick boot - the time it takes to test your RAM should be enough to let the HD catch up.

 

[micronet]

Thanks for the reply Nodsu.

Unfortunately There was no BIOS settings to slow the HDD detection time, nor was there one to disable quick boot.

I kept tinkering and I finally solved the problem, although I don't know why this works.

I changed the BIOS SATA mode from IDE to RAID and now the cold boot works fine. Maybe this changes the detection time and allows the drive to fully spin up. I hope this thread may be usefull for others.