HDD not always posting, please help.

[Iggie]

I've been fighting with this off and on since I built my PC a couple weeks ago, and still have yet to fix it. About half the time I turn on my PC (sometimes more, sometimes less), the hdd isn't recognized, and I end up with a disk boot failure. So far, I've simply restarted at that point, and usually it's detected within the next few tries and continues to work perfectly.

CPU: Athlon 64 3500+
Mobo: A8N-SLI
HDD: 70g Raptor (Originally built the PC with a 320g WD SATA, which had this exact same problem)... [both have passed the SMART test]
PSU: OCZ Powerstream 520w

I've fiddled with BIOS settings now and then, though in truth, I'm not sure what everything in it means/does, so I could have missed something obvious (RAID is turned off though). This is the third SATA cable I've used while having this problem... Also tried hooking the hdd into the third SATA connector on the mobo, which of course didn't fix it. And yeah, the BIOS is the most recent, as are the Nforce4 drivers.

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[pscowboy]

I'm making the assumption this is only happening on cold boots.

I came across this problem twice. It may be that the fast cpu and bios are handing the system over to the OS quicker than the hard drive is ready for it. I kind of "solved" it by having POST count the memory (I disabled quick boot). Those two machines never had a problem after that.

Try it, to at least see if you always get recognition. This is probably an inherent problem in an occasional mobo.

 

[Iggie]

It's not just on cold boots (just had it happen on restart a minute ago).

And sadly, I've tried disabling quick boot before (and again today), but it doesn't help any.

*sigh* Just kind of leaving me dumbfounded here.

 

[cmptrdude79]

Basically, there are two options here. Either the drive is bad (not likely, considering that you had the same problem with two drives), or the integrated HD controller on your mobo is failing.

If you have a spare SATA controller card laying around, you could always hook your drives up to that and see if that takes care of the problem, but other than that, the only solution would seem to be a new mobo.