hard drive order changes itself each reboot

What if you just swap around the cable? will it always boot from SATA drive 3? If you do that and it tries to avoid it again, then I would say it has some problem with that specific drive.

The SATA drives are new and they work fine as far as reading/ writing. I have had 2 drives installed and had this problem of Hard Drive Priority automatically getting changed in BIOS.

When I had 2 drives it was like

Hard Drive Priority
1 = SATA 2
2 = SATA 1

So no, it is not always trying to boot from drive 3. I have tried swapping the cables, and I have tried changing jumpers to make the drive with XP the master, and the others slaves. Neither seem to help.

Ok, need to be a bit clearer here.

-If you make your XP boot drive physical SATA drive 3, will it always boot without changing the BIOS? That seems pretty obvious, but of course I have to ask.

-Are you saying the order changes every time? If you booted twice would it just happen to work the second time?

-I have no idea if this has any bearing, but did you happen to name all three drives the same when you formatted them? (that's just a wild stab in the dark, volume name shouldn't really be an issue).

-I don't know your specific BIOS, but all of them I have ever seen assign boot order for all drives, including your optical drive. If you assign your DVD drive as the first does it stay put?

-Have you flashed your BIOS?

Hi,
I have the exact same problem with the same motherboard.

I have 1 SATA drive (newly installed for storage, backups etc)
2 IDE drives fed from a PCI card.
1 external drive.

When I set the boot order to :
IDE1, IDE2, SATA, EXTERNAL
Save and reboot, the order gets changed to
SATA, EXTERNAL, IDE1, IDE2.

Set them back to the order I want as above, reboot and it says insert boot drive (or words to that effect) - as the XP is installed on IDE1...

This is driving me crazy....

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Cheers,
Drew

RTFM:

4-38 of your manual refers to setting the removable drives, ODD and master hard drives...

Try setting these up then setting your boot priorities. I know i had an ASUS board that wouldnt even list the hdd as a boot priority if it was the "master" drive in that area.

(i wasnt being rude with the RTFM call either  )