boot disk priority problem

[oddlink]

Edit: silly me i forgot to update the bios when i formatted.....:

alright so i was getting these weird messages about ntldr not getting found when i was booting up and figured out that somehow my hard drives had got switched in bios for the boot disk priority, well, i changed them around, booted up fine, then once i totally powered off, it switched back again... i decided to formatt my hard drives, and reinstall windows just in case it was software related, and the same thing happened, not on restart, but only on complete power down... my drives are correctly labeled as master and slave in bios, just in boot they are in the wrong order...
my computer consists of
abit is-7 mobo
p4 2.6c
4 x 256mb crucial pc3200
maxtor 120gb
samsung 60gb

the way that i have the hard drives set up is i have the maxtor partitioned into a 40 and a 80, running windows off the 40g, the maxtor is faster than the samsung.... anyone got any advice????

 

[johnjkr1]

Try the hard drive on a different channel. If you have two hard drives, they shouldn't be on the same cable anyway.

 

[oddlink]

what do you mean on a different channel?? my mobo instructions said to put the hard drives on the primary ide channel and then to put the cdroms on the secondary ide channels... thats what i got done... is it possible that i have them on backwards or something??

 

[amdskip]

What he is saying is to set it up like this:
Primary channel - master main boot drive
slave an optical drive
Secondary channel - master other hard drive
slave an optical drive
Personally it sounds like your cmos battery (battery on the motherboard) may be dead and when you change a setting in the bios it does not have the battery power to remember the setting you changed it to and thus having to switch it every time.

 

[oddlink]

alright new info, the reason why the boot drive keeps going to last on the priority list is because, this is really weird, on initial boot, the master drive is not showing up under bios, then when i exit bios, and it restarts, the drive is magically back, cept last on the list, so i guess i hafta figure out why it is not showing up on first boot??

 

[boomerang]

Sounds as if the HD or your motherboard is going bad on you. When the HD is not detected is the optical drive not detected also? If so, I would say it's the motherboard. If not , then the HD. You could try a new cable if you have one handy but I wouldn't bet the farm on it being the cable.

You could also run the diagnostic utility from the drive manufacturers website, but it sounds as though when things get a little heat in them all is OK so this may not tell you anything.

Edit: I assumed you had swapped the drives as amdskip suggested. If the configuration is as you originally had it, then it would be both Hard Drives not detected and that is not the case. It's the cable or the HD itself under this scenario.

 

[oddlink]

i think it is my power supply, i had some fans on the same plug as my hard drive, like earlier on the chain... and so i switched those to another chain, one for one of my cpu coolers devices, and so now everything works..... maybe the hard drive didnt get enough electricity in time for the bios to pick it up?? i have no idea, anybody have an idea on if that is a possibility??