Hard Drive detection problems

[Pilchard]

I have just upgraded MOBO/MEMORY/CPU and kept original hard drives x 2, CDROM and AGP Card.

System will only boot maybe 1 in 10 times because it seems to have problems recognising the hard drives. I have checked cables and replaced with the cables that came with MOBO.

I have upgraded to latest BIOS.

Spec is:
Gigabyte 8S648-RZ
P4 2.53 Celeron CPU 533FSB
256MB Kingston DDR333
Hard Drives are Fujitsu MPC3084AT primary, MPG3204AT secondary.

Any ideas greatfully received.
Thanks.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to TechSpot

When you change your mobo, unless it is an exact replacement of the old one, you will have to reinstall Windows, no matter what version you have. This is because of all the different drivers for the new chipset, audio, LAN, raid, etc.

 

[redfoxtx]

While realblackstuff is completely right, this sounds more like a bios problem than an OS problem, as in the bios is having difficulty with detecting the hdds.

It seems odd that it works some of the time, generally speaking with BIOS issues, the problems occur or they don't, its not as fical as on OS in the respect.

If I were you, I'd just check to make sure your jumpers are set up correctly (often times Cable Select won't work and you'll have to put them in as master and slave) and that all your power and ide cables are firmly in place.

You may also want to run the IDE HDD Auto-Detect in your bios, and make sure that comes up with the right thing, if that doesn't theres no way that windows can.

 

[Nodsu]

It may be that your PSU does not have enough power to spin up your hard drives at startup or it happens too slowly. Look for a IDE HDD delay option in BIOS.

 

[Pilchard]

Update

Thanks for the feedback so far. A little bit of extra information.

1. Unplugging the second hard drive increases the likelyhood of boot-up. Interestingly it never starts from power up, but will start almost everytime after pressing the reset button. This appears to support the theory of a power issue?!

2. If I go into the BIOS setup and attempt to Autodetect the drive - this fails everytime - even if the drive has been correctly detected up to this point - i.e. the setting seems to clear?!

To respond to one comment - on the very first start-up Windows did re-install itself and had to be reactivated.

Thanks for further comment.

Regards
Simon.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

After the automatic detection has established the parameters of that troublesome HD, try and set those settings manually, then reboot.

See if there is a delay-setting in your BIOS, to give your HD(s) a bit of extra time to spin up, before the system boots.

 

[Nodsu]

Your update confirms it's a HD spin up issue.

You can verify this by pressing the Pause key during bootup (beore HD detection), waiting some 10 seconds and then pressing any other key to resume startup. If it boots fine then it means that you need a delay for your HDs to spin up.

There should be an option for this in BIOS. If not, try BIOS update.