Hard Drive Not Detected

[SWCarter]

Over the past few days, I've been putting together a new computer for the first time. The motherboard is an Asus P6X58D-E, and the hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB drive. The computer appears to boot up correctly, but when the BIOS page comes up, it can't detect the hard drive, and so I'm not allowed to enter set-up, and I get the error message "reboot and select proper boot device."

The hard drive is a SATA drive, and the motherboard only seems to support SATA connections. I've tried using different SATA cables, and re-connecting the power cable, and plugging the drive into different SATA connectors (including SATA1) to no avail. The hard drive light comes on for a second during boot-up, so it seems to be getting power correctly. The SATA DVD drive is working properly (not that I can do much with it without the hard drive).

Is there an easy way to tell if I have the hard drive set up incorrectly, or if it's just perhaps bad? Thanks for any help.

SWC

 

[tecmo34]

Have you tried booting from your DVD to install your OS?? If you just go through the boot process, you will get this error since you have no OS installed.

Have you gone into your BIOS to see if it is showing your hard drive??

 

[SWCarter]

Well, that was confusing. I thought because the boot-up process was reporting that it couldn't detect a hard drive, that meant I couldn't install anything, including Windows 7. But now I've installed the OS, and I've checked the BIOS set-up and it lists the hard drive, and everything seems to be working fine -- except that for some reason the boot-up process is still reporting that it can't detect a hard drive. Is that important if everything seems to be working? Thanks for your help.

SWC

 

[tecmo34]

-- except that for some reason the boot-up process is still reporting that it can't detect a hard drive. Is that important if everything seems to be working? Thanks for your help.

Go into your BIOS (advanced options) and disable the Marvell Storage Controller. This should solve your issue.

The message has no effect on the peformance of your PC.

 

[SWCarter]

That fixed the problem. Thanks for your help.

SWC

 

[SWCarter]

Best answer selected by SWCarter.