Samsung EVO 840 SSD / ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0 - SSD not seen in BIOS/Disk Manager

[AgentBJ09]

I've installed the drive into my system with the SATA cable going to Port 1 of 6. (My mechanical drive is in Port 3, and the optical drive in Port 4.) When I booted the system up, it didn't recognize the new drive in BIOS, nor ask me to format it/assign a drive letter to it in Disk Manager.

My drivers for the motherboard are the ones from the installation DVD, my BIOS version is 0906 x64, and the configuration of the Ports is AHCI for 1-4 and 5-6.

I've heard these SSDs from Samsung don't play well with AMD systems, and when I was first building my PC three weeks ago, after installing the OS to the SS drive before hooking up my mechanical drive, it died within four boots with a Disk Read Error and I had to reinstall on the mechanical drive.

I've looked through the SSD Guide posted here - (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265764-32-guide-installed-disk-system) - and seen something about a controller chip, but I've no idea what that is or if it's needed for this motherboard.

What should I do first? I'm in no rush, but I'm a bit nervous about a second dead drive if I do something wrong.

EDIT: My BIOS is now ver. 2501.

 

[clutchc]

Are you sure you just aren't finding it in the BIOS? The section that allows you to enable a drive other than the boot drive can be hard to locate in some BIOSs. Try this, disconnect everything except the SSD from the SATA headers. Boot to BIOS.
1) Being the only drive now, it should be easily recognized as the boot drive. If so, it is just a matter of finding where the other drives can be enabled.
2) If it doesn't show up, the SSD may be defective.

 

[AgentBJ09]

Are you sure you just aren't finding it in the BIOS? The section that allows you to enable a drive other than the boot drive can be hard to locate in some BIOSs. Try this, disconnect everything except the SSD from the SATA headers. Boot to BIOS.
1) Being the only drive now, it should be easily recognized as the boot drive. If so, it is just a matter of finding where the other drives can be enabled.
2) If it doesn't show up, the SSD may be defective.

It's interesting you mentioned that, because that's exactly the trick I tried when I had the SSD before. It saw the drive when that was the only one there, and I loaded Win 7 fine at that time before the Disk Read Error came on.

I'll look around my mobo manual again and see what I find.

 

[clutchc]

On page 3-26 of your MB manual are the Boot Priorities menu. That would be the place I'd look after you reconnect all the drives again.

The downloadable manual can be found here: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M5A97_LE_R20/HelpDesk_Manual/

 

[AgentBJ09]

On page 3-26 of your MB manual are the Boot Priorities menu. That would be the place I'd look after you reconnect all the drives again.

The downloadable manual can be found here: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M5A97_LE_R20/HelpDesk_Manual/

I'm seeing a Disabled option show up within the Boot Priorities. It's attached to Port SATA_2, and the ESP on that port is enabled.

EDIT: I've found another user here with the same problem, (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/388272-31-with-win7-boot-priority-list) and the suggestion was uncouple every drive, then reattach them one by one until all the drives are recognized. I'll give that a shot and see what happens.

EDIT 2: With one drive attached, the SSD in Port 1, it shows up just fine.

EDIT 3: I clicked the Samsung drive under Boot Override by accident, booted into Windows 7...and NOW it gives me the option to create a Master Boot Record with the drives in place.

I'm thinking that this worked now because of how I set up the drives, that being Port 1 (SSD), Port 2 (HDD), and Port 5 (optical). No changes to anything else were needed, but I think I'll still need an ACHI driver for the Samsung drive.