SATA Weirdness

[mvmone]

Hi all,

I have 2 SATA disks in my machine. The first is a boot disk (300G Raptor) connected to SATA 1 on the MB. The 2nd is a storage disk (250G Caviar) connected to SATA 2. However, in Windows 7 disk manager, they show up as SATA 1 (RAptor) and SATA 0 (Caviar) respectively. Harddisk Sentinel also reports what disk manager is seeing. In BIOS, though, the drives look to be in their proper places SATA 1 and 2. Any explanation for this? I my SATA controller going bonkers?

Some additional info:

This is a new build and seems to run great except for this issue and some fairly regular Fallout 3 crashing (from what I understand, I'm not alone here). I've suffered no other crashes that I can recall. The vid card drivers are Catalyst 9.12. The OS is running DX 11. The BIOS was just flashed to the most recent version (2603) this evening. Win 7 installed all the mobo drivers, so I'm assuming they're current. Is that my mistake?

Any info is greatly appreciated.

 

[sturm]

If the computer is working correctly, don't worry about it. It doesn't matter where the drives are plugged in. SATA starts with port 0 sometimes. Bios may just report it as 1.

 

[mvmone]

CoFR Sturm by chance?

The problem with that is why would it assign the drive that is plugged into SATA 2 to SATA 0? Wouldn't it assign the first drive it sees to the lowest assignment? In this case, since the Raptor drive is plugged into SATA 1 on the board (there is no SATA 0 on the board) wouldn't that drive be assigned to SATA 0 by the controller?

And while it's consistently making these assignments, on boot-up it's not. For instance, sometimes it will boot right up, maybe 20-30 secs...other times it will take over 3 minutes. I'm assuming that, in these instances, it's searching the non-boot disk (Caviar) for an OS...which it doesn't find. While the Windows screen is up, there will be constant HD activity for a few minutes until it (I'm assuming) switches to the correct and ONLY boot-disk in the machine...the Raptor on SATA 1.

See what I mean about weird? The only way this makes sense is in some alternate SATA universe where 0 > 2.

 

[sturm]

Have you set the raptor to be the first boot device in bios?

I'll try and check my system when I get home and see what it shows.

 

[mvmone]

Right now it's at BIOS defaults due to the recent bios flash...floppy, WD3000HLFS, Sony Optiarc.

 

[jsc]

And while it's consistently making these assignments, on boot-up it's not. For instance, sometimes it will boot right up, maybe 20-30 secs...other times it will take over 3 minutes. I'm assuming that, in these instances, it's searching the non-boot disk (Caviar) for an OS...which it doesn't find. While the Windows screen is up, there will be constant HD activity for a few minutes until it (I'm assuming) switches to the correct and ONLY boot-disk in the machine...the Raptor on SATA 1.

No. If you had designated the Caviar as boot disk, it would look for the OS there, not find it, stop, and give you an error message. It would not keep looking.

 

[mvmone]

BUMP. So, I got in touch with WD customer service, but they don't support drives that have been partitioned! I ran their Data lifeguard tools and none of my drives show up as Physical drives...they're all listed as Logical drives. Any idea how I can remedy this situation?