intermittent hard drive detection

I have a GA-K8N Pro SLI motherboard and am currently experiencing boot
problems.

I built the computer about a year and a half ago. When I first built
it, I had problems with the machine going into the NVidia Boot Agent
and not booting XP. When it stopped happening, I stopped caring...

However, the problem has resurfaced. Whenever I boot up the PC, it
detects my DVD burner (the only IDE device) and does not detect my
Sata hard drive. It goes on to the NVidia Boot Agent, and I can
disable that, but it still does not detect a boot drive

I have flashed the bios to bring it up to date. I have a hard time
believing it could be the hard drive, because I have not had any
issues with data retrieval, system boot, etc... except for this problem

I've tried a different SATA cable and used different power connectors.
I've tried the different SATA inputs on the board.

Does anyone have any ideas? Please do not post if all you are going to
say is "you need to install the raid drivers by pressing F6 when
installing windows." I did that originally.

If you can offer any help, it would be greatly appreciated.

In article <1192072484.218327.151650@k79g2000hse.googlegroups .com>,
oppeltm@gmail.com says...
>
> If you can offer any help, it would be greatly appreciated.
>

Hmmm, not sure how helpful this is going to be, but I'll offer some
observations:
I know of the phenomenon, was a big bother to people trying to boot off sata
drives with the Abit NF7-s mobo. (previous one I had)

Not entirely sure if it's a windows problem, or a hardware problem, but the
sequence it's gone for you I'd suspect Windows to be the culprit.

I decided to duck the issue by booting off an ide drive and leaving the sata
drive for data and other programs, and I have kept that arrangement when I
upgraded to a GA-n650sli recently. Just not prepared to deal with that kind of
aggravating intermittent situation.

If that was me, I'd try repairing/reinstalling Windows first, and if that
doesn't do the trick I'd move the boot partition to a smallish ATA drive.

-P.


--
=========================================
firstname dot lastname at gmail fullstop com

There are many google results on this, most seem to point to sata controler
driver issue.
Assuming youve double checked the bios settings, for sata & boot order, I
think I would prepare a new sata controler floppy with the latest drivers
from Gigabyte and undertake a repair install of winxp and use the F6 option
to reinstall these, then reinstal latest chipset drivers from Gigabyte
(I'm using K8N Ultra 9, 3 sata drives on a bootable sata card, 1 on Sil
controler, 2 ide)

You might also double check the hd status with the hd manufacturers bootable
floppy checking utility


<oppeltm@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1192072484.218327.151650@k79g2000hse.googlegr oups.com...
>I have a GA-K8N Pro SLI motherboard and am currently experiencing boot
> problems.
>
> I built the computer about a year and a half ago. When I first built
> it, I had problems with the machine going into the NVidia Boot Agent
> and not booting XP. When it stopped happening, I stopped caring...
>
> However, the problem has resurfaced. Whenever I boot up the PC, it
> detects my DVD burner (the only IDE device) and does not detect my
> Sata hard drive. It goes on to the NVidia Boot Agent, and I can
> disable that, but it still does not detect a boot drive
>
> I have flashed the bios to bring it up to date. I have a hard time
> believing it could be the hard drive, because I have not had any
> issues with data retrieval, system boot, etc... except for this problem
>
> I've tried a different SATA cable and used different power connectors.
> I've tried the different SATA inputs on the board.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas? Please do not post if all you are going to
> say is "you need to install the raid drivers by pressing F6 when
> installing windows." I did that originally.
>
> If you can offer any help, it would be greatly appreciated.
>

An update:

So in the startup prior to launching Windows I would see where it
wouldnt detect the hard drive. I because so frustrated that I decided
to just switch to an old IDE hard drive. Turns out that my machine
would just shutoff whenever.....power management. Ah ha!

So, I swapped the Power Supply with a different one and the problem
did not return. Waiting about a month and swapped it back in. The
same problem resurfaced....I know its not a smoking gun, but I'm 90%
its a bad power supply. I guess we will see.

Thanks everyone for your help - this was one of those problems that
should be easy to fix but got the best of me...for a while....