First time flashing BIOS for AV8 board

I just tried to flash and upgrade the BIOS to my Abit AV8 board a few days ago because I went from a single core to a dual core processor. The BIOS updated fine, but now it won't recognize the hard drives. I have two Western Digital SATA drives (different sizes) and they won't show up on the BIOS at all. Only when I go into the menu for the RAID config does it even acknowledge the drives are there.

I don't understand why the board is not recognizing the drives, they're plugged in, the cables are fine, and I don't know what's going on. Even trying to repair or reinstall Windows is no good. It can't see the drives there either. Help please!!!!!

I went into the option that asks if I want the SATA RAID to initialize during POST, it was on 'enabled'. I switched it to 'disabled' and still nothing. I doesn't ask about the RAID config anymore, but I still cannot boot from my hard drives. The BIOS still shows nothing. All that is showing are the two IDE DVD burners and not the SATA drives.

There are only two SATA plugs, no separate ones for RAID. My BIOS is setup it recognize SATA and ATA drives and the plugs themselves are fine.

I've tried different cables and I've reinstalled the SATA drivers. Here's what I've done so far:

Installed an IDE hard drive and installed XP on that.

Installed the SATA drivers, now the two SATA drives show up as secondary drives in addition to the IDE drive.

I am able to access the files that are on the SATA drives, but what I want to do is use the system the way I did before, meaning I want to boot from the SATA drives. As of now, the system won't boot from the SATA drives.

The OS is installed on the drives. I've been using this system for two years now. When I decided to upgrade the processor, my mobo required an upgraded BIOS. Immediately following the update, my system no longer recognizes the SATA drives.

The thing is, the SATA drives don't appear at all in the BIOS. Originally, I had two SATA drives installed; one with Windows XP and the other as a secondary drive. When I flashed and upgraded the BIOS, neither drive was being picked up by the system.

To make sure nothing on those SATA drives was deleted, I installed an ATA drive and loaded Windows onto that one. Once that was done, I was able to, from the 'My Computer' menu in Windows, see the two SATA drives.

Unfortunately, that is not how I want my PC set up, since the ATA drive is temporarily taking the space of a secondary DVD Burner that I need. I need my PC to be able to boot from the SATA drives as it once was able to do. For some reason, when I go into the BIOS and select which drive I want to boot from, neither of the SATA drives show up (but they used to).

I haven't changed them since I originally set the system up two years ago. There are also no markings on the drives that tell which is 'master', 'slave', etc.

I think you should backtrack here. You've made just two changes, the CPU and the Bios. let us assume for now that the CPU can't be directly responsible for controlling the Hard drives, HOWEVER the bios most definitely IS critical to how the hard drives are managed. Thus the problem must be Bios or its program. I would try to flash to an older verson of the Bios, the oldest that still supports the EM64 or whatever the upgraded CPU is (I wish you'd specifically listed the two CPUs) I have had a similar issue where video would not work properly after a bios flash due to resource assignment, using a different bios solved the issue. And that's another point, a completely new bios, one a couple years newer, will handle motherboard memory management differently. Hard drives can disappear due to resource conflicts, try removing all plugin cards, soundcard, Ethernet etc, and see if the drives are recognized on next boot.

OK, I've loaded an earlier version of the BIOS onto a floppy and followed the instructions on Abit's site on how to flash (same as I did the first time).

I loaded the floppy, copied the files, and restarted the computer. I went into the BIOS and set the floppy as the first boot source, then restarted again.

The floppy loaded, then I get a message like, "REMOVE ALL DISKS AND MEDIA. PRESS ANY KEY TO RESTART"

I follow that, then the system restarts. I go into the BIOS and check the version. The BIOS hasn't changed. I repeat the steps, but this time I don't remove the disk and I hit any key to restart. The same "REMOVE ALL DISKS AND MEDIA. PRESS ANY KEY TO RESTART" message keeps appearing.