i belive he's talking about before windows boots.

It sounds like the bios order is getting messed up. Are you specifying the drive to be first or are you telling it to put the SATA first? My bios lets me choose the device order & the drive specific order, and with the drives it lets me choose from all of them.

yes , B4 windows starts, and have SP 2 installed ,and yes I put the SATA drive as the first in the boot priority, then the CD drive, then floppy. save that.
then after the proceedure per my explination above, upon restart when it wont boot, i go back into BIOS and see that the SATA drive is not in the boot sequence and been replaced by the drive thats in the tray. Ive even tried moving the IDE cable ie using the secondary plug instead of the primary.

Sounds like it is really not saving your BIOS settings.

Try some different boot order, save, then restart and check the settings. Are they back to the default again, or did it save your new setting?

I don't know why you are talking about "before Windows starts."

There is no DOS boot anymore, it's all Windows, and the Windows code starts working from the very beginning, long before you see it on the screen.

Pre-SP2 Windows was lacking proper support for SATA boot drives.

Anyway, the BIOS may be corrupted. See Chapter 4 in the manual for how to update with a fresh version.

Would be good to also check the RTC battery on the mobo. Would seem to be less likely that a brand new battery is kaput, but it could happen.

Maybe you already tried this, but....

In the "Boot" section of the bios for this motherboard there are two different menu items that have to do with the boot sequence. One is the usual menu called "Boot Device Priority" where you specify the sequence for CD, floppy, HD, etc.

There is another important menu item in the Boot section, I can't remember what it's called and I am building a DVD right now (can reboot later to read the bios). Anyway, this menu item only lists hard drives. You should delete all the drives on this list except for the SATA drive. Press F10 "Save and Exit" (as you were doing before) and the PC should not even attempt to boot off any other device.

(Sounds like you already tried this but I wasn't sure...)

Do you have the latest bios from Asus?

He's talking about the BIOS post, not DOS.

Agree on Jaysters suggestion, although he might be talking about the "silicon image mode" (raid) or that the bios is enabled fro SATA 1/2 (non-silicon image).

*to add: I don't really see why people want to use RAID (other than mirroring for saftey) with an A/V sys. You're sata drives as is are going to serve you just as well. Don't settup any other RAID just cause you can IOW.

Hmm, NF4 mobo.
What is the model of your boot SATA drive?
You using the SATA 1 connection for your SATA boot...correct?

BTW: You overcloking? You know the drill then brotha. Stop it, go back to normal for your cpu/ram and test ;)


>>and all works fine but if I shut down to remove the drive in the tray, then reboot it is still fine. However if I then shut down a reinstall the tray, then reboot it wont<<

I'm curious, are you powering off/unplugging the pwrsupply at this point (see above)?

If so, I'd first check the easy things like that mobo battery (replace it, it's cheap ...or see if it might be installed wrong or something there isn't making good contact).

Then verify ide cabling and jumpers on ide devices are set properly (slave devices set to slave - gets middle connector only, and master set to master nd get's the end connectors only.
Sata is pretty cut and dry in setup, but little ide setup issues can cause all sorts of weird issues - so rule them out.

For kicks, try a startup boot of:
- floppy
- sata HD
- CD-rom (or n/a)

After that, I'd search for the latest BIOS update and flash it (or re-flash that one if t's the latest).
*make sure you read exactly how your mobo handles a bios update.
Sounds like you know how to do this though.

Then, if it's still occurring...I'd say it's time to start with the basics.
cpu/ram, 1 vid card and 1 sata drive (boot) connected to the mobo (unhook all other devices - including their respective pwr connectors). Test it in this enviro and see what happens. Add in one at a time and test...a bit tedious, but it might be related to a particular device/setup and you'll prob nail it.

* also take another peek at the case wiring connections (HD led, reset, etc) as funny things have been known to happen with any incorrect setup there.
Any + and - reversed? (happens all the time).

You SURE you have an adequate power supply for all this btw? Funky issues "can" crop up in that dept if it's questionable (espec with two vid cards).
I'd say 550-600w should be your minimum (avoiding cheapo/no-name brands too of course).

Try these things first before chalking it up as a bad mobo and replacing.
I'm curious as for the SATA HD model for your boot, there are a small handfull of problematic models out there still (rare though).

But I bet you're gonna nail it if you take and test step by step.

here's some links/tips:

- check out the irq sharing info in your manual. Even though new systems can usually handle IRQ issues now, you still might want to avoid any sharing of expansion cards and key mobo elements (I/O ctrlr, steering, etc).

- be sure to disable the Cool n Quiet in the bios. No need for that crap.

- bios/drivers/etc: http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us

Latest bios (use bios tool):
Version 1205 2006/05/16update

Description A8N32-SLI Deluxe Bios version 1205
1- Enhance PCI / PCIE compatibility
2- Support 7900 Series VGA cards
3- Enhance SATA RAID compatibility

File Size 519.73 (KBytes)


- some bummer news:
that Silicon Image 3132 ctrlr on NF4 mobos has been known in rare cases to cause audio/video" issues with audio/video (crackling audio, skippy vid).
You may or may not experience this (hit or miss...I hope you hit and have no probs).

You'll prefer the Ti chip 1394 ctrlr though.

That mobo has two controllers: 1) an nForce 4 SLI (it hosts the two IDE cables and 4 SATA drives) and 2) a Silicon Image 3132 SATA controller (one internal and one eSata port). My guess is he has all hard drives on the nForce controller.

yes thanks guys did go into the second menu of the boot mode that lists the HDD's (theres also one for removable drives too.)and deleted all except theSATA.reboot and rechecked the saved settings they stay as set until the drive is reinserted,the IDE keeps popping will be back in there .

normal shut down via power button.
using the NVidia nforce controller
CMOS battery seems good, holds all other data and changes except this issue.
all SATA drives are identical WD 250 gigs
IDE in the tray is a Seagate 300gig.

Got me kinda stumped, figure I'll call ASUS maybe tomorrow.
First Ill try your steps Jaydeee.
the swap drive tray will stay in mainly but want to use it to save projects too to take home to work on from time to time.

BTW thanks to your all suggestions the new machine other than that is running great. Using the NOS oclock feature is that the way you guys go or do you set it in the BIOS?

AMD4400 X2
2gig RAM
beating the pants off my older 3.4 P4 !!!

I manually overclock it by setting the HTT speed (like front side bus on Intel) to 220 MHz. That way it is consistenly overclocked to 2420 MHz, just a tad faster than what the X2 4800+. I think NOS lets the operating system or a driver decide what speed to run it at. Might be more conservative than what I'd want.

It's been running rock solid at this speed. You can get good runtime info on your PC's speed buy using the CPUID utility.. I did purchase a $23 third party CPU cooler (the Arctic Freezer 64) as insurance to keep the CPU cool. It replaces the stock CPU fan and it does a great job.

I wonder, when you go into the bios, the first menu says "Primary IDE Master, Primary IDE Slave, Secondary IDE Master" and so on, all the way down to sixth (for the SATA drives). I've found that on modern motherboards you can have a drive in slave configuration all alone (i.e. no "master" present on that connector) and it will still work just fine. Assuming you don't have any other devices on that connector.. I wonder, if you put the IDE drive as "slave" would it stop doing causing your problem (i.e. start to always give preference to the SATA drive)? I'm not sure this is worth trying, it is just a thought. Someone might complain about the idea, but I've put an IDE device in this configuration on a removable tray and it didn't cause any issues. Drive speed tests found it was just as fast as it ever was.

Jayster, will give those o'c try, and Im gonna mess around with the IDE cable location and jumper pins again just to be sure.
BTW i have the same artic freezer too, temp runs around 43-44c right now with NOS will try your way too.

How does it work when you're not ocing? I would oc manually btw if you must.

Shout from the peanut gallery...

But really...
you're not really gaining that much from a 4400 to a hair over 4800. it just isn't worth the added wear, cooling worries, etc. This isn't like the old 1.6a at 2.4+ ghz type of oc.
How much have you increased the vcore for the 4800?
There's more to just the cpu/mem factor to ocing...what about the case and all the components put into it? You don't think the temp will rise with a basic mid-tower and all that stuff unless you're addressing that?

your temp is 43-44? Not that that's too bad, but what is this at...idle? To give you and example my 4400 stock is 30c idle - on the hottest day (just a basic hsf air/arctic silv 5 at stock speed).

Sorry, but if yer having issues like this, you should be baggin any oc-ing until you know the systems oc limitations.
But it's your data and sys, so go to town.

jaydee - not sure if you were addressing that to epirb or myself.. I didn't have to touch any voltages to achieve this amount of oc'ing. I did it step by step, doing upwards in increments of 3 MHz on the HTT. Never even phased the system. Only "mod" I did (if you call it that) was to set the memory to get it's timing from SPD instead of the slightly faster CAS times that I had initially set manually to match the memory's rated fastest latency speed. I haven't seen any significant rises in temperature, probably thanks to the Arctic Freezer 64.

I've seen the benchmarks, all over Tom's Hardware and various magazines, and the jump from 4400+ speed to 4800+ speed IS significant.

In any case, what's the difference between one CPU and another in the same lineup with a slightly higher speed? In some cases it might be that it got a better score in their manufacturing tests so they configured it for a higher speed. In other cases it might be a marketing decision (i.e. keep the quantity of low-speed chips high and vice versa to keep the prices in line).

All my data is backed up redundantly (once on an external eSATA drive and a 2nd backup on a file server) and I use Acronis 9.0. Not having seen a single crash (yet) at this speed, I'm not worried. And the way technology goes, I'll likely be buying a new PC before this one dies.

the asus boards will reset the cpu settings to default (or bare min's, i forget) if OC'ing fouls up, so I doubt it's that.

You could always buy a seperate IDE controller. That might solve the problem.