SATA Shuffle

I have a ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO mobo and 5 drives.
The SATA ports are marked SATA1, SATA2, SATA3, SATA5, SATA6. (I love
computer counting) Port 1 is a single port. 2-3 are paired and 5-6 are
paired.

For some reason the mobo looses the boot drive. Since I log on to the
computer remotely, I don't have it connected to a separate keyboard
and mouse and monitor.

I don't really care what the drive letters are, but to complicate
things, I have partitions on the drives.

I can attach the boot drive to SATA1 and it boots. I attach the next
drive to SATA2. The drive letters are out of order with D: on drive 2
but it boots fine. Because I ran into trouble before, I fixed the
drive letters where C: and D: are on the first drive. I can then
attach drive 3 to SATA3 and it boots.

When I try to attach drive 4 to SATA5 I get a message that there is no
boot drive or some such. I can unplug the drive and it boots fine
again.

Since I don't want to have to connect another mouse/keyboard/monitor,
is there some way to connect the drives another way where the BIOS
doesn't lose track of the boot drive?

I have, in the past had to change the boot order in the BIOS to fix
this. You would think plugging the drives in the correct order would
prevent this.

Seymore4Head wrote:
I have a ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO mobo and 5 drives.
The SATA ports are marked SATA1, SATA2, SATA3, SATA5, SATA6. (I love
computer counting) Port 1 is a single port. 2-3 are paired and 5-6 are
paired.

For some reason the mobo looses the boot drive. Since I log on to the
computer remotely, I don't have it connected to a separate keyboard
and mouse and monitor.

I don't really care what the drive letters are, but to complicate
things, I have partitions on the drives.

I can attach the boot drive to SATA1 and it boots. I attach the next
drive to SATA2. The drive letters are out of order with D: on drive 2
but it boots fine. Because I ran into trouble before, I fixed the
drive letters where C: and D: are on the first drive. I can then
attach drive 3 to SATA3 and it boots.

When I try to attach drive 4 to SATA5 I get a message that there is no
boot drive or some such. I can unplug the drive and it boots fine
again.

Since I don't want to have to connect another mouse/keyboard/monitor,
is there some way to connect the drives another way where the BIOS
doesn't lose track of the boot drive?

I have, in the past had to change the boot order in the BIOS to fix
this. You would think plugging the drives in the correct order would
prevent this.

Look for this line in the manual.

When this item is set to [AHCI],
only SATA 1/2/3 and ESATA can be detected.

I have no idea what they're talking about, as the
rest of the short note, leaves a bit to be desired.

Some AMD Southbridges, will be split into a four port
controller and a two port controller. The working properties
seem to be associated with a four port controller. The
ESATA is Port 4. The Port 5 and Port 6 may behave
a bit weird.

You could try running the whole thing in RAID, with
each drive as a JBOD drive (not in a RAID array), but
I don't know if this would make a difference or not.
That could well be a giant amount of work for nothing.

You also have the IDE cable to test out. Maybe some
IDE to SATA adapters, would allow connecting some more
drives to the IDE ribbon. I have such an adapter here,
used when I want to do HPA work on a SATA drive, or
when I want to temporarily house a SATA drive in my
IDE-only enclosure. There probably aren't many of those
for sale any more.

It's possible a very modern chipset uses a 6 port logic
block, and this "weird split issue" is not present.
Really, there's no excuse for the two logic blocks
to have different capabilities. I know why they're
split that way - legacy operation in IDE emulation
mode on SATA, only supports four drives. So that's an
excuse to split the ports into two groups. But you'd
think when *not* using IDE emulation mode, the ports
could all be treated the same. The BIOS should hide the
details, and make them behave uniformly.

Paul

On Fri, 26 Jun 2015 15:28:07 -0400, Paul wrote:

Seymore4Head wrote:
I have a ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO mobo and 5 drives.
The SATA ports are marked SATA1, SATA2, SATA3, SATA5, SATA6. (I love
computer counting) Port 1 is a single port. 2-3 are paired and 5-6 are
paired.

For some reason the mobo looses the boot drive. Since I log on to the
computer remotely, I don't have it connected to a separate keyboard
and mouse and monitor.

I don't really care what the drive letters are, but to complicate
things, I have partitions on the drives.

I can attach the boot drive to SATA1 and it boots. I attach the next
drive to SATA2. The drive letters are out of order with D: on drive 2
but it boots fine. Because I ran into trouble before, I fixed the
drive letters where C: and D: are on the first drive. I can then
attach drive 3 to SATA3 and it boots.

When I try to attach drive 4 to SATA5 I get a message that there is no
boot drive or some such. I can unplug the drive and it boots fine
again.

Since I don't want to have to connect another mouse/keyboard/monitor,
is there some way to connect the drives another way where the BIOS
doesn't lose track of the boot drive?

I have, in the past had to change the boot order in the BIOS to fix
this. You would think plugging the drives in the correct order would
prevent this.

Look for this line in the manual.

When this item is set to [AHCI],
only SATA 1/2/3 and ESATA can be detected.

I have no idea what they're talking about, as the
rest of the short note, leaves a bit to be desired.

Some AMD Southbridges, will be split into a four port
controller and a two port controller. The working properties
seem to be associated with a four port controller. The
ESATA is Port 4. The Port 5 and Port 6 may behave
a bit weird.

You could try running the whole thing in RAID, with
each drive as a JBOD drive (not in a RAID array), but
I don't know if this would make a difference or not.
That could well be a giant amount of work for nothing.

You also have the IDE cable to test out. Maybe some
IDE to SATA adapters, would allow connecting some more
drives to the IDE ribbon. I have such an adapter here,
used when I want to do HPA work on a SATA drive, or
when I want to temporarily house a SATA drive in my
IDE-only enclosure. There probably aren't many of those
for sale any more.

It's possible a very modern chipset uses a 6 port logic
block, and this "weird split issue" is not present.
Really, there's no excuse for the two logic blocks
to have different capabilities. I know why they're
split that way - legacy operation in IDE emulation
mode on SATA, only supports four drives. So that's an
excuse to split the ports into two groups. But you'd
think when *not* using IDE emulation mode, the ports
could all be treated the same. The BIOS should hide the
details, and make them behave uniformly.

Paul
I did a chat with Asus. They confirmed I had to do the BIOS thing.

Thanks

On Fri, 26 Jun 2015 17:29:07 -0400, Seymore4Head
wrote:

I did a chat with Asus. They confirmed I had to do the BIOS thing.

Tricky, anyway. Can throw off both my Boot Arbitrator and Windows
drive assignments when I plug in another HD to either the two parallel
ATA provisions, or the 4 SATA. Which often will, as well, negate
prior to reassign the BIOS boot settings in somewhat an arbitrary
fashion. Maybe that's a (Gigabyte) "feature," though.

I dig into it, get it right, try to, and do binary sector backups.
Then leave it alone, which sometimes turns to bite me further along
when forgetting what I did for pulling a proverbial "duh" out of my
butt.