n0otro

I have three hard drives installed on my computer. C: & D: are SATA raptor 10K's, 74 & 36gb respectively. drive E: is a 300gb IDE drive.

My computer is a Giga-byte M55Plus-S3G with an Athlon 64 3200 processor

I've sucessfully had it running for several months running XP & Vista, no problems whatsoever.

A few times here or there i've had a problem at boot where my SATA drives wouldn't be recognized and I get a DISK BOOT FAILURE error since my E: drive is not bootable. Usually I reset the computer and everything is fine, SATA drives recognized and the computer boots like a charm. In the past week this has happened 3-4 times, and today I can't get my computer to regonize my SATA drives at all.

I want to doubt that the hard drives are both bad because they are relatively new(3-4 months old), and purchased at different locations. it's also odd that they would both fail at the same time.

To me it sounds like a Motherboard/BIOS issue. Has anyone had this problem before? is this likely?

Thanks for your help.

n0otro

Hey bra, no need to be a jerk about it. I posted here because I was unsure of my problem, and I value the expertise that can be found at this website. I was hoping someone might be able to confirm my suspicion, but now that I know the kind of people that represent the website, i'm not so sure I will be coming back anymore.

Chevy

What's the wattage of your power supply. I could be that the drives aren't being spun up quickly enough, so they're seen as not ready.

smz

Good Point (to a point), lol.

I too have Gigabyte Board and I too have an occasioinal issue with a cold boot causing drive failures with my raid which is SATA based and attached to the Gigabyte SATA controller and not the standalone SATA controllers. Personally I think it's a spin up issue live Chevy says. I just do and control alt delete and let it restart itself as a warm boot. Never a problem for me when I do that. I mentioned the power supply as being probably a null issue for me since it's a 600 watter, but at the same time. On top of the 2 SATA raid drives, I'm also powering up a 10K SCSI drive along with a Core2 Duo Overclocked and a 7600GT PCI-E card. Got over 100 extra watts to play with according the a PSu calculator but one never knows.

dai

check the data cables are secure
try new cables

n0otro

Chevy: I have a 650watt Antec TruePower Trio power supply.
My 3 hard drives + my nvidia geforce 7900GS should be well accounted for. The computer is plugged into a ACP UPS

Anyway, here's an update.
after probably 10-15 tries booting (turning the computer totally off, unplugging it, letting it sit for 1+ hours) as well as ctrl-alt-del rebooting, I wasn't able to get the drives recognized.

I then cleared the CMOS via shorting the jumper, plugged the computer back in and turned it on and my drives appeared. At this point my C: drive was booting, but was taking an INCREDIBLY long amount of time to boot. I mean, normally it would boot in ~30seconds, but now it was taking 15-20 minutes (i was doing other stuff around the house and just letting it sit) when it finally booted up, nothing worked properly and it was still VERY slow. Even when I tried running the Vista install disk, it would take very long.
I powered down, and removed the SATA cable from the c: drive ,so the only SATA i had attached was d: through the secondary SATA channel. It booted my alternate partition quickly. I powered down, and plugged the first SATA drive into my 3rd SATA port and tried to boot, and I got the same slow boot-up. So now it's temporarily unplugged until I figure out what's going on, and i'm using the smaller SATA drive on the secondary channel for my OS. I've tried plugging that one into the first SATA port and it stalls.

This makes me suspect DAI is onto something and I need to get new cables for my drive.

Thanks for your help guys

smz

It surely is the most cost effective troubleshooting method. In most cases you may have left over cables from your motherboard. It never blows me away enough that huge problem can get troubleshooted for days on end and it turns out to be a cable or a jumper or something just tiny.