Erik Funkenbusch

On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 10:16:34 -0800 (PST), raylopez99 wrote:

>> I will assume that you've checked you boot sequence. You probably
>> want to make sure that your primary SATA drive has been properly
>> installed. The BIOS also has a "Compatibility" mode for the SATA
>> drives. This may have been defaulted to the harder to support AHCI
>> interface. The compatibility mode lets the BIOS "emulate" an IDE
>> drive (OS sees the drive as IDE instead of SATA). This does prevent
>> the command queing features of SATA-II.
>
> Interesting. I just checked out AHCI on Wikipedia and it looks
> tough. I think you may be onto something, since the BIOS mentioned
> "spread spectrum" is the default for SATA on this board (the mobo is a
> cheap but somewhat functional product by ASRock ConRoe133-D667 release
> 2.0)--it only has one IDE slot for example which necessitated hooking
> the DVD/CD as a "slave" to the EIDE I am using now as a primary HD-see
> my previous post just now to this thread)

Spread Spectrum is not a setting for hard disks, that's a memory setting,
typically used to reduce problems with electrically noisy environments.

You also want to make sure it's not in RAID mode if such a mode is
available, usually you have to disable RAID or set RAID mode to "Legacy" or
SATA or something like that.

>>> > Is the drive configured to be a primary master? Some bios's won't boot off
>>> > secondary or slave drives. Also, set it to Master explicitly, don't rely
>>> > on cable-select.
>>
>> SATA drives don't have any selection jumpers. Since the SATA cables
>> are smaller, it's easier to run 4 separate cables instead of two
>> multiconnector "bus" cables.
>
> True, true. SATA is nice and fast but on this system hard to
> configure.

Sorry, didn't notice that it was SATA. It's still strange, because you
should at least get to the boot manager.

Have you tried pressing F8 just after POST (you might have to do it
repeatedly) to see if the boot menu comes up?