Bootsequence mixup

[FenixII]

Hi ppl, I hope I'm posting this in the right place.
Since I don't know what is causing my problem, it's hard to know.

I've got several hard drives, and sometimes the bootsequence gets mixed up in my BIOS, thus startup fails and I get a message to "install proper media and reboot."

I'm using a "ASUS P5B P965 S-775 GBLAN ATX" MoBo, less than a year old. I'm using bios v. 1604

my HD's is a Maxtor IDE drive (Primary)
the other one is a Hitatchi SATA(Slave)

The problem is not very frequent, but worrying. Could it be related to using the IDE as primary drive? Any ideas on what might cause this error?

Thankfull for any insights that may solve or atleast explain this.

/A

 

[turtile]

Are they windows installs? If they are, they'll go in order of last installed.

Go to control panel > performance & maintenance > system > advanced tab > then select settings on the startup area and you can change the boot order and delete ones that don't work.

 

[atomic tofu]

maybe your cmos battery is almost dead, so it's having a hard time retaining the memory...that or the main boot drive might be biting it as well

 

[FenixII]

Well, I've thought about it being an indication of my main HD crapping out.
Shouldn't that manifest itself in additional ways? I have no other problems.

The problem isn't frequent. first time was perhaps 6 months back, then again a little over a month ago when I had been away for a week and disconected all powercables while gone, finally yesterday. This time the computer had been turned of (but not disconnected from the main) overnight.

I've got two OS's installed, both WinXP, The battery is as old as my MoBo, less than a year.

Thanks for your input!
/A

 

[turtile]

Do you know which drive the boot partition is on? I would scan the drives for probelms. Some motherboards will automatically make the SATA drive the primary by default.