P5WD2 HardDrive Boot Order Problem

[pee4]

Hi,

I cannot select my preferred boot order for my 2 hard drives with the AMI bios on my Asus P5WD2 Premium motherboard.

I have one hard drive connected to the Primary IDE controller and a second hard drive connected to the builtin ITE8211 IDE controller. Both hard drives are in removable drawers (caddies).

By default the motherboard boots from the Primary IDE controller.

If I set the AMI BIOS settings so that it boots from the hard drive connected to the ITE8211 controller, everything works fine UNTIL I remove that hard drive (removable drawer) from the PC. On the next boot the AMI bios sees that the ITE8211 hard drive is no longer in the PC and automatically changes the bios settings to make the first boot drive the Primary IDE hard drive. If I now put the ITE8211 hard drive back into the PC it will continue booting from the Primary IDE controller instead of the ITE8211 hard drive (which is not what I want).

On the Award Bios motherboards you can set "Boot From Scsi First" to
"Enabled" and you do not have the problem because it will always boot from the auxillary hard drive if it is in the PC.

Can anyone suggest some way to overcome this problem?

Thanks

John

[Weedsqueezer]

In the Boot settings on mine, if you go to boot there is a item for disk drives priority and also boot priority, You are saying you still have the problem after you set both of those?

[pee4]

Hi Weedsqueezer,

Yes. That's what I am saying. You can change those settings, but once a hard drive that appears within those settings is not present on any particular bootup, it is autoamtically removed from within those settings in the bios. When the PC is rebooted again with the drive present again, it will re-appear in those settings but not at the previously "saved" locations.

Thanks

John

[Weedsqueezer]

Wierd, I had an abit board do something like that to me long ago, so I RMA'ed it and got rid of it, what that one would do was "forget" hard drives, no perticular one, just random. Have you tried swapping the drive cables? or even as simple as a system battery? That is wierd

[pee4]

Hi again,

In this case, it's not an IDE cable problem. I have all my hard drives in removable drawers (caddies) and I like to be able to remove them. Because the AMI bios boot order is set by selecting devices (eg. hard drives) and not by selecting controllers (eg. Primary IDE, ITE IDE, Silicon Image SATA) as soon as a hard drive drawer is removed from the PC the bios establishes a new boot order and drops the old boot order.

In the Award bios (not AMI bios) on my old board you could select to boot from PCI controller first, and this would work anytime a drive was attached to it. Nice.

I thought someone might have an idea of how to implement this with AMI bios. I'd like to edit the bios and create my own version if possible.

Regards

John