Boot issues with multiple HDDs

[zaphod911]

i have a very irritating issue, from which the almighty google has been unable to help me with. alas, i turn to professionals...

I have an older asus a8n premium mobo with 4 gigs of mushkin ram, an opteron 170 with a mild OC, a newer 3870, and 9 HDDs. yes, 3x 1tbs, 3x 500gbs, 1x 320gbs, and 2x 160gbs in RAID1.

My problem is the following;

When i have all HDDs plugged in and powered on, i cant boot to my win7 64 bit install. I couldn't even install any version of windows onto any of the HDDs. pull the power on three HDDs, and voila! I was able to boot and install win7. I tested a 64bit copy of ubuntu, just for kicks, and found that it would boot with all HDDs powered on and connected.

now im really stumped, ive updated the mobo BIOS, removed the overclock, done just about everything that i could think of...

anyone have any ideas?

 

[alexruiz]

How about the PSU?

 

[zaphod911]

1.21gigawatt!

sorry, its a 1kw from antec... quadro something. should be plenty of power....

 

[zaphod911]

alright, the PSU is an Antec TruePower Quattro 1000W.

bumping for HELP!

 

[zaphod911]

seriously now, nobody knows?

 

[Geofram]

Power is still the most likely culprit, although it does sound like the power supply should be enough.

I assume you must be using some kind of add-on RAID card for these drives; where are they all plugged in? Did you unplug some from the RAID card or from the motherboard? And did this configuration ever work, or is it a newer thing you're trying out?

I wouldn't eliminate the motherboard from being the culprit; I've had one before that didn't like having even 6 HDDs, even though it had connectors for 6.

 

[jdjbuffalo]

I agree that power could be an issue.

I've also had an issue with some motherboards that don't like it when you pull hard drives. It will reorder the boot drive and try to boot to a non-bootable hard drive like my movies hard drive. I have to go into the BIOS and tell it which one to boot from and save the changes to the BIOS. It will then happily boot.

 

[Binky]

Is your primary boot drive connected to the first SATA port? It sounds like you have multiple boot loaders installed on two or more drives.

 

[zaphod911]

thanks for the tips!


Geofram:
All HDDs are going into the mobo, except for 2 of the 500s which go into a generic sata add-on card. I cant see power being the culprit, as the system boots into a livecd of linux, and as it allows me to power all hdds + graphics + cpu intense applications while running. and i mostly use these HDDs to transfer video between each other.

buffalo:
even if i select the disk to boot from in my bios, it wont boot.

binky:
im pretty sure i already reformatted all drives, as well as never installed to any driver larger than 320... Ill reformat again to double check.

What really boggles me on this subject is that it boots just fine into a linux x64 live cd...

either way, ill reformat and rearange my drives and post back if it gets better.

 

[zaphod911]

Ok, so i formatted everything, put all drives on the same controller, and still could not boot to windows. I posted, but just couldnt boot.

So i stripped all three troublesome HDDs and now everything is working peachy keen!

Hopefully i dont have any issues with the RAID - otherwise im a happy camper!