Plextor 16/10/40A - odd booting.

[Reno]

Strange problem this, one which has had me confused for a good few weeks. Anyway, I have a Plextor 16/10/40A attached to a Gigabyte GA-71XEH. The problem occurs in the following way:

When turning the computer on, the hard disk drive and the dvd rom drive are found first time by the bios. However, the plextor drive simply flashes repeatedly and is not found by the bios on first boot and thus does not appear in windows.

Pressing reset enables the bios to find the drive on the second boot. Any ideas?

Oh and the drive will not flash with the new bios file on the plextor website. No problems with the drive though in any other respect.

Help!

 

[T-Shirt]

Originally posted by Reno
Strange problem this, one which has had me confused for a good few weeks. Anyway, I have a Plextor 16/10/40A attached to a Gigabyte GA-71XEH. The problem occurs in the following way:

When turning the computer on, the hard disk drive and the dvd rom drive are found first time by the bios. However, the plextor drive simply flashes repeatedly and is not found by the bios on first boot and thus does not appear in windows.

Pressing reset enables the bios to find the drive on the second boot. Any ideas?

Oh and the drive will not flash with the new bios file on the plextor website. No problems with the drive though in any other respect.

Help!

How is it connected to the IDE?
I believe there is an issue with some Plex drives, where they need to be the master. Check the FAQ's at the Plextor site

 

[Rick]

Just some ideas:

• Check all of your jumper settings. Do not use cable select for any drive.
• Use trial & error by disconnecting certain drives and use a variety slave/master configurations to help troubleshoot.
• Flash your BIOS with the newest one
• Upgrade your CD-ROM firmware

When turning the computer on, the hard disk drive and the dvd rom drive are found first time by the bios. However, the plextor drive simply flashes repeatedly and is not found by the bios on first boot and thus does not appear in windows.

Make sure your BIOS settings are correct. If your Plextor is on an IDE channel, you should set it to "Auto Detect" or manually enter it as a CDROM.

If you have your CDROM placed on an integrated or card-based ATA/66+ disk controller, then the CDROM will not be detected by the BIOS since disk controllers have their own BIOS.

Next, check your jumpers and make sure they are in traditional slave/master configurations. Switch your slaves and masters around.. Disconnected hard disk and other CDROMs... Just try putting your Plextor with different places to see if you can resolve the problem. I usually give it an IDE slot all by itself, to see if the problem goes away. Also, sometimes drives are picky as to where they are and what they are hooked up to.

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Another thing you might want to do (if your mobo suppoprts it), is to set the "IDE delay" to 1 or higher... That'll give the BIOS more time to "look" for IDE drives...

It's usually only a problem on older drives, but might help you here

Hope this helps!