I've seen this Problem on the forum before, but haven't seen a satisfying answer to go with it :) I have a Biostar P4VTB Motherboard with serial raid. I have a Samsung 80GB SATA hard drive that is recognized and works fine. I have a Sony DVD-R drive as master on my secondary IDE channel and a 20 GB IDe drive as a slave on the same secondary channel. The system will boot up and see all the drives one time and then the next time it boots, the DVD drive and hard drive won't show. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. When they do, everything works fine, Windows can access all drives present. Is there a problem with using the SATA and IDE bus at the same time? What should the jumpers on the IDE devices be set at? I have tried having the DVD drive as Master and the IDE hard drive as Slave, as well as having them both set for Cable select. again sometimes they work but most of the time they don't. Does anyone know what the problem might be? Thanks much!

I don't believe the SATA controllers currently support optical drives, therefore is seems logical that SATA & ATA were designed to work together. Do you have 2 ATA IDE channels? Are you using the first one? How do the IDE drives show up in the BIOS? Are they IDed by model, or just say auto or CD? I would suggest using the first IDE channel. Use the option in the BIOS to auto detect, not just set to auto. Model numbers for the drives should actually display in the BIOS.

Thanks for the response! Both drives show up in the BIOS with their correct models and capacity, WHEN they show up at all. I was using the secondary IDE channel although I have tried them both. Now I've switched them to the primary IDE channel with both drives set to "cable select" and the are both showing and usable at the moment. This has happened before and the next time I boot up they probably won't show. I've read somewhere about Motherboars that can only have one IDE device attached if you are using the SATA controller, but my motherboard Manufacturer doesn't say anything about this limitation. Thanks for the help. I welcome any further advice!

Are other settings going south in the BIOS also? Like the correct time. Awile back ECS had alot of MBs being shipped with bad batteries. If the battery is defective the time should shift in the BIOS. Just a thought. I also have read about problems running only one drive on RAID. Not just with SATA either. That doesn't seem like it should have an impact on your problem though. If the problem persists you might consider a BIOS flash. Even if there isn't an updated BIOS for your MB you may still have a bad flash. One other thing I just thought of. I had a problem awile ago like yours. I use a full tower and was using flat 24" ribbon cables. I read a article about how the length is critical at the frequencies used and that the flat cables are not shielded. I searched online and found round cables with shielding on them. Ordered some and haven't had a problem since. Not all round cables are shielded, and not all shielded cables are fully shielded.

Try temporarily disconnecting the DVD drive and see if it fails the same.