BleepingComputer.com: First hard drive not detected

I recently purchased 2 Seagate ES.2 750gb drives. The problem I am having is that the first hard drive is not detected initially. If I restart the computer (either with a hard reset or by going into the BIOS and then exiting so that it goes through the POST process again) it is detected fine.

I have tried changing the power cables and sata cables. I have also reversed the order that the drives are plugged in. It doesn't matter what I do, the hard drive that is plugged into the lowest SATA slot is not detected. If I go into the BIOS and do an autodetect of the hard drives the first drive shows up as only 136gb. I have also tried plugging a third hard drive (also a Seagate, but an older model) into a SATA slot ahead of my ES.2 drives and the old drive is detected but the first of the new drives is not.

I have tried flashing the BIOS to the newest version but that hasn't fixed it. I am assuming this is a motherboard issue because it doesn't matter which drive, it only seems to be affected by the order in which they are plugged in. I looked at the SMART data on the drives and I don't see any problems. Needless to say, unless I remember to restart the computer every time I turn it on this is wrecking havoc with a RAID setup that I wanted to use. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to fix this?

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 (rev. 2.0)
http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/Motherbo...?ProductID=2539

This post has been edited by kjm782: 07 December 2008 - 01:34 PM

Just guessing...

If you have a RAID 1 setup...one of your drives will "disappear", since the combined drives are only seen as having the volume of one drive (of the same size).

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/l...leLevel1-c.html

But...that doesn't account for what happens on reboot.

Maybe that BIOS flash was uncalled for, but...the BIOS settings are where I would look.

Louis