Strange problem - the MB cant "detect" the HDD

[Anthares]

I have ASUS P8H67-M Motherboard, SATA 2 hard drive(plugged in a SATA 3 connector) and IDE DVD drive. When you restart the PC first you see the asus logo. After that the systems detects the devices. In my case it detetcts 1 hard drive and 1 dvd drive. After that Windows 7 starts. Everything was OK until today. I restarted the PC and it was not able to detect the hard drive - only the DVD drive. So after the detection proces it showed on a black screen an error message. Something like "hard disk drive error Press Ctrl-alt-del". After some thinking i replaced the SATA cable connecting the HDD to the motherboard. And it worked - windows 7 started without problem. The strange thing is that even with the new cable it still can't "detect" the HDD after the logo screen but windows starts without problem.It detects only the DVD drive. When i enter BIOS i see that the HDD is detected - even with the old cable BIOS was again able to detect the HDD.
So this is the problem my HDD is not in the list of detected devices just after the asus logo but windows starts without problem. So to see if the problem is in the Hard drive or in the motherboard, i connected a second sata 2 HDD to the motherboard. Again after the logo screen no HDDs detected. When windows loaded - it detects the second HDD without problem. So the problem is in the Motherboard i think.

I tried to change some options in bios but no luck. The PC cant "detect" the HDD when it starts but loads windows without problem and all my files are intact.

Any suggestions what's going on here or how can i fix that?

 

[o1die]

If your board has reset the bios settings due to a failed boot, then go where the ide settings are in the bios. If you loaded windows in "achi" mode, it's possible that you need to change the setting again from "native ide" back to achi.

 

[Anthares]

Even before the problem the setting was IDE - and it worked. Now again is IDE and it does not "detect" the HDD. I used the option "load defaults" in BIOS but even this does not help.