BleepingComputer.com: Installing Sata Dvd Drive

I decided to replace my ide dvd rw with a SATA DVD drive. My existing system has a WinFast K8S755A mobo and two SATA HDD connected to sata 3 & 4 connectors. Every time I connect the DVD the system fails because it is trying to boot from the DVD.


The BIOS shows the two hdd's on ide channel 2 & 3 but doesn't show the DVD sata when I boot after installing it.
When I exit the bios and allow the boot to continue the system is looking ad the CD/DVD reader that is installed on IDE Channel 0 master to boot from. The boot device sequence is hdd, hdd, CDROM.

I've tried moving the SATA hdd's to sata 1 & 2 and that doesn't work either.

TIA,

Peter

I'm not 100% sure here - but I suspect it's either your SATA drivers, a setting in your BIOS, or a defective drive.

Did the DVD drive come with an installation CD? Have you run that?
Have you updated your SATA drivers recently?
Are you able to try another SATA DVD drive?
I would suggest resetting your BIOS to default values to see if that's an issue (but copy down all the settings first - in case the default makes the system unbootable).

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No installation CD

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I haven't updated any drivers - as far as I can remember I just connected the HDD's and they worked

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No but I could try a new SATA HDD

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As far as I can remember the BIOS is pretty well in default mode but I can check this out.

The mobo installation CD has two SATA drivers on it - SiS SATA RAID and Sil3112 SATA RAID and I'm unsure whether they are both just connect with the RAID facility which I am not using.

The strange thing that happens is if I move the existing SATA cables for the HDD's to SATA 1 and 2 the HDD's appear on the screen in the boot sequence but not in the BIOS. I'm going to check if there is an updated BIOS for the mobo as the current one doesn't seem to recognise the SATA drives in a regular way.

Peter

I'm not sure about your mobo, but mine has 2 separate SATA controllers - and one is used for the hard drives only, while the other controls hard drives and optical drives (the JMicron I think).

SATA drivers (IME) are similar to RAID drivers - in fact, most downloads of SATA drivers will make some reference to RAID also.

Interestingly, this google search seems to reveal a lot of issues with SATA and this board:
http://www.google.com/search?q=WinFast+K8S...lient=firefox-a

I can't seem to locate a link to this board's specs (it's early here) - could you locate one?

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:HWKgu...;cd=2&gl=us

Louis

One of the Google search results is suggesting that the two sets of SATA sockets are discrete - two for RAID and two for IDE.

I bought a PCI SATA card so I'm going to have a shot at installing that again and try using it with the drivers that came in the PCI box.

Peter

I installed the PCI SATA card and the drivers that came with it and the DVD SATA worked first time in spite of the incorrect written instructions for installing the drivers.

Thanks for your help.

Peter

Seems like a controller problem with the onboard SATA, glad you worked around it.

Louis

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there's a setting for raid card boot first under pnp/pci

there's also a setting for sis serial to be ide?

This post has been edited by DaChew: 12 February 2008 - 05:22 PM