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Computer Conundrum
I have a new computer. Everything is working fine, EXCEPT that I can't get the machine to boot from the SATA DVD drive.
I even sent the drive back and used a friends old IDE CD drive to install windows. It came back with the same problem.
No matter what I set in the BIOS, the machine isn't even looking at the DVD drive before booting from the HD. No lights, no spin, no error message, it just starts booting windows, even though CD is set first in BIOS. I even tried setting the CD as the only boot device, and it still booted windows from the HD. Reflashing the BIOS did no good, either.
Once windows loads, everything works fine.
The drive is a LITE-ON DVD-RW, the HD are seagates (only one is formatted. I was going to make the second drive LINUX but since I can't boot from the CD...), the motherboard is EPOC with an AMD Athalon 64X2 chip and 2 GB ram.
The machine only has the one optical drive, no floppy either, so I need to make this work. Anybody know what is going on?
PS anybody know a good free program for playing with partitions (formatting, changing size (shrink and grow) etc.)? I just noticed that the drive isn't registering in windows, so I couldn't use it to format the drive in NTFS even if I wanted to.
I even sent the drive back and used a friends old IDE CD drive to install windows. It came back with the same problem.
No matter what I set in the BIOS, the machine isn't even looking at the DVD drive before booting from the HD. No lights, no spin, no error message, it just starts booting windows, even though CD is set first in BIOS. I even tried setting the CD as the only boot device, and it still booted windows from the HD. Reflashing the BIOS did no good, either.
Once windows loads, everything works fine.
The drive is a LITE-ON DVD-RW, the HD are seagates (only one is formatted. I was going to make the second drive LINUX but since I can't boot from the CD...), the motherboard is EPOC with an AMD Athalon 64X2 chip and 2 GB ram.
The machine only has the one optical drive, no floppy either, so I need to make this work. Anybody know what is going on?
PS anybody know a good free program for playing with partitions (formatting, changing size (shrink and grow) etc.)? I just noticed that the drive isn't registering in windows, so I couldn't use it to format the drive in NTFS even if I wanted to.
Comments
Also, I know the BIOS considers it a CD drive since it is listed in the menu for CD Drive priority.
And yes, I tried "removable" as well, just in case.
Besides, I shouldn't need to update my BIOS to install my operating system!
I should probably throw in that my HD are also SATA. Weird.
It's in the legacy programming of BIOS. BIOS checks ports sequentially. Check IDE 1, master, slave, check IDE 2 master, slave. When they added SATA, they didn't change the method. So now it's check IDE 1, check IDE 2, Check SATA 1, Check SATA 2....
They didn't take into account free ordering, though. SATA doesn't have to be loaded sequentially to work like IDE (nothing in IDE 1 master but something in IDE 2 or IDE 1 Slave causes IDE to fail horribly, although you can have both IDE 1 and 2 with only masters), it isn't part of the standard. So you can load SATA 1, 2, and 6 as I did (with the plan of putting more HD in the middle later) and it should work fine. It did work fine once windows loaded, thanks to newer detection protocols. But BIOS stops looking when it encounters an empty port in sequence, so it saw the HD in 1 and 2 and then saw 3 was empty. Moving the CD to port 3 fixed the whole problem.