I have a P4 3.0ghz using Intel D865GBF board. I have 2 IDE drives and 1 SATA drive. The boot C: drive is IDE with 2nd IDE as D: and SATA as drive E: for just data. I know, should have installed windows to the SATA, but added the SATA later. Anyway, the system has been working fine. I have been have some video editing problems and it was suggested to update bios and drivers. After updating the bios I had problems restarting the computer, it was asking for a bios password. I never set one, so I contacted Intel ($25), they worked me through the problems by finally removing the cmos battery and clearing all bios passwords. I finally made it back into the bios settings and changed all the settings back to the way they were before the bios update. The computer would start to the Intel screen and reboot over and over until hard shutdown. Intel told me to remove all hard drives and USB connections and try again. Fine, I now the computer booting up with just the IDE drives C: and D: just fine. As soon as I reconnect the Sata drive it goes into the continuous reboot mode again. I have changed bios settings for drives and boot order but still can't get SATA to work. Any ideas?

I'm sorry if this doesnt help, but ive had terrible experiences with Intel chipset motherboards... personally, I recommend sticking with motherboards that are FULLY compatible with SATA drives, that run on AMD processors (like the Athlon XP, Athlon 64, or the economic Sempron model) and that have a VIA Technologies chipset... or AMD chipset. Nvidia chipsets are bad either, also look out for the new ATI Radeon Xpress 200 series chipset board, its supposed to kick some serious chipset action.. for some ideas, personally ive never had much experience with SATA hard drives (or drives for that matter) you should try updating the chipset drivers.. make sure your motherboard fully supports SATA drives, and that your motherboard supports your P4 processor and its FSB, etc. Right now, ive got a computer in my house that has an Athlon XP 2800+ at 333MHz FSB, but my motherboard only supports up to 266MHz FSB, and so my motherboard wont let me insert any devices in the PCI slots... good luck on your SATA problems!

see if you can reflash bios back to earlier working one as sometimes bios updates can cause problems instead of fix them, friend of mine had 2 scrap to motherboards because autoupdate reflashed bios that was now screwed david

Ok, i finally found the problem. I was finally able to get into the bios with the SATA drive connected. And for some unknown reason, when the SATA drive was connected, the boot order changed to booting from the SATA (which has no OS). It should have reported a disk error instead of constantly rebooting, but what ever, it is working great now. By the way, I always find it interesting how peoples opinions of products vary so much. I have built and installed hundreds of computer systems over the years and I would use nothing but Intel. At least as far as reliability goes, I have never had to replace an intel board. I have had problems and defects with many other brands. For example back in 1998, I built 6 computers with SOYO boards and within 2 years, 3 of the 6 had failed. I replaced the remaining 3 when Windows XP came out because Soyo could not provide a Highpoint controller driver that would work at the time. I agree, that if you are looking for performance, overclocking and customization capabilities, Intel is not the way to go. But I am getting old now and I am looking for compatibility and reliability. Besides, I have to go back to the customer if it fails.