Hard disk order in BIOS

[kumarkumar]

I have a Foxconn MCP61SM-AM motherboard. It has two SATA connectors and one IDE connector.

I have two SATA hard disks connected to the two SATA connectors. There are no IDE peripherals.

The hard disk order appears in BIOS as below. What do I need to do so that they appear in IDE Channel 0 Master & IDE Channel 0 Slave?

[Kelsenellenelvian]

There is no way

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

You're using WinXP or better, correct? There should be no problem with that arrangement as is.

You can probably disable the "On-Chip IDE" if you need to have more IRQ's available for some strange reason, in that case maybe the BIOS will stuff the SATA drives in different slots on that first screen, or maybe not.

However, disabling something in the BIOS normally enabled ( and vice versa ) will suddenly become toggled later when the BIOS gets reset to defaults or failsafe after some error, or if you flash or change the battery. This is why I like to leave the drive settings at their default whenever possible so that some strange thing is less likely occur later.

P.S. did you just time travel forward from 2006? When you go back I need you to invest some money for me on MSFT, I mean, AAPL and GOOG

[MrJinje]

Easy, get a SATA to IDE connector and connect the sata drives to the IDE port that register as drive 0,1.

[kumarkumar]

P.S. did you just time travel forward from 2006? When you go back I need you to invest some money for me on MSFT, I mean, AAPL and GOOG

I thought resetting the CMOS would make a difference. That's how I went to the past

Easy, get a SATA to IDE connector and connect the sata drives to the IDE port that register as drive 0,1.

Ok. So Channel 0 is for the IDE connector.

The problem with this setting is, boot time is very long. On boot, it starts to find "something" and goes in loops. After several numbers of tries, it boots to Windows. I can see the light blinking with each try.

Whereas if there is a IDE hard disk connected to IDE, it boots up immediately. So it feels that the BIOS is trying to look for the non-existent hard disks in IDE.

Edited September 12, 2013 by kumarkumar

[MrJinje]

In snapshot 2, I see a setting for PIO AUTO, disable them 2 buggers so your BIOS doesn't scan the port. Is there by chance an IDE cable connected to motherboard with no drives on it, unplug if there is.

and rememberer to turn them back on if you install an IDE later.

Otherwise, can you find a page where you can choose exactly which HDD to boot so that it doesn't have to do any searching.

Edited September 12, 2013 by MrJinje

[kumarkumar]

In snapshot 2, I see a setting for PIO AUTO, disable them 2 buggers so your BIOS doesn't scan the port.

Will try that today.

Is there by chance an IDE cable connected to motherboard with no drives on it, unplug if there is.

Exactly so. There is an IDE cable connected with nothing connected to it. Wow!

So just a non connected passive cable makes a difference? (Who would have thought)

But how does the system know that a cable is connected? It's just a passive cable with nothing connected and while connecting it doesn't push some switch or short jumpers, etc to let the system know that it's connected.

Otherwise, can you find a page where you can choose exactly which HDD to boot so that it doesn't have to do any searching.

Yes, there is a page in the BIOS to select hard disk priority for booting. It shows only the drives that are connected (i.e. the two SATA drives). And one if them is the first boot hard disk. So this option is ruled out.

[puntoMX]

I see that the SATA controller is set to SATA-I, set that to SATA-II if your drives are SATA-II. Sometimes there is a jumper on the drive that sets the drive to SATA-I, remove it if it's still on there.

Link to your mobo: http://www.foxconnchannel.com/ProductDetail.aspx?T=motherboard&U=en-us0000310