theYinYeti Posted January 20, 2009 Report Share Posted January 20, 2009 I have an Asrock ConRoe945G-DVI. I find its bios to be absolutely awful! I never understood how disks are managed, and unfortunately no BIOS update seems to address the issue… The motherboard has 4 S-ATA-II connectors, and 1 P-ATA (master+slave) connector. When I rebuilt “sedentaireâ€, I put the boot disk (IDE) on the P-ATA connector as “cable-selectâ€, the data/backup disk on the S-ATA-II-1 connector, and the DVD drive on the S-ATA-II-2 connector. I reset the BIOS to its “optimal defaultsâ€, and saw that all three peripherals were shown, but the boot disk (cable select) showed as “slaveâ€. No problem, I halted the PC, changed the cable plug on the P-ATA disk, booted to BIOS, reset it anew, and the drive indeed showed as “master†this time, but then the DVD drive had disapeared! As it was still possible to select a generic "CD/DVD" item as the first boot device, I set it up that way and tried to boot the Mandriva 2009 DVD, to no avail… So I switched the PC off again, changed the cable plug on the P-ATA disk, booted to BIOS, and reset it anew. The drive of course reverted to “slave†and the DVD drive was back, and I set it up as the first boot device. This time the 2009 DVD booted fine, and the installation was a breeze, including installation of Grub on the boot disk (IDE) MBR. Unfortunately, the PC is now unable to start: It says the first boot device is not ATAPI-compliant (or something like that), “… press F1 to continue.â€, which I do but then the screen remains black with a blinking cursor on the top-left, and nothing happens. Is someone able to explain this “AMI Bios†(funny that: ami means friend in French; this AMI surely is not my friend) behaviour to me? Will I have to accept not being able to boot from CD/DVD to be able to boot from the IDE disk? Is it an entirely different matter? Yves. [note: Previously on this PC with two IDE disks, I managed to have both DVD and hard disk as possible boot devices by booting on the slave's MBR, and then switching master and slave in software using lilo commands, which led to a non-standard setup, difficult to repair when the need arose. I prefer not to repeat this setup if possible at all] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tux99 Posted January 20, 2009 Report Share Posted January 20, 2009 (edited) Do you not have a 'normal' IDE cable (not cable-select) and then you could set the master jumper on the master hdd? Alternatively try moving the DVD drive to a different SATA port. Else, see if in the BIOS there is an option that says something like: SATA legacy emulation/SATA native If yes put this to SATA native. It looks like the BIOS boot priority is SATA first then IDE, check if there is any option to change this. Edited January 20, 2009 by tux99 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted January 21, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 21, 2009 (edited) Thanks tux99. I thank you for your help. It is unfortunately hard to diagnose things with this bewildering Bios because it reports different things in its menus and during the start screen! Thus, what I previously wrote may be wrong… or not. Needless to say, with such inconsistency, I got a little lost. I tried to play with the jumpers as you suggest. I checked the mode (was “Enhancedâ€, I did not try “Legacyâ€). I finally found a configuration that works, and I fervently hope I won't have to change it ever. I put the IDE HD as master (not cable-select), but that was not enough, so I played with enabling/disabling of S-ATA-II connectors. It happens that with S-ATA-II-3 and S-ATA-II-4 both enabled or both disabled, the DVD drive is not seen anymore. But with S-ATA-II-4 only disabled, then the DVD drive correctly shows on S-ATA-II-2… that's the first step :) Then I told the Bios to boot from DVD first, then HD, and set the boot HD to be the IDE one (only one HD can appear in the boot sequence). I rebooted and the empty black screen came again. In the Bios, the S-ATA HD was the boot HD! I insisted on placing the IDE HD as the boot HD a couple more time, and the DVD in first position, as the HD crept in first position once, and the PC finally accepted to boot from DVD if present else the IDE HD, even though the start screen still lists the S-ATA HD as the first HD :wacko: Yves. Edited January 21, 2009 by theYinYeti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tux99 Posted January 21, 2009 Report Share Posted January 21, 2009 I'm glad it now works, it sounds like the developers of the BIOS didn't intend/expect anyone to use the 'old' IDE connector for the boot HDD, as generally in new PCs the HDDs are on SATA, the IDE connector is there only for older CD/DVD or other removable storage drives. Asrock is the 'low-cost' brand of Asus, evidently to keep costs low they let the apprentices program the BIOS and don't do any QA testing afterwards... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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