Today while installing a new CD burner I decided to change my IDE drive from the standard IDE channel to the Ultra 100 Bios on this A7V MB. Even though the hard drive is recognized by the 100 BIOS the computer will not boot from that drive. The floppy is the secondary boot up drive and the computer tries to boot from the floppy. I am sure this is something simple to fix but I cannot find a solution. Can someone tell me to make the HD the bootable drive using the Ultra 100 BIOS? Thanks

do you have the correct IDE cable installed. (the 40 pin 80 wire) just changing the setting in BIOS should not mess the drive up but you need to make sure that the drive is ATA 100 capable and that you have the correct cable.....

I have doubled checked, the cable is 80 wire and the drive is ATA 100 capable. Tomorrow I will install another cable just in case this one is damaged. The first BIOS check does not see the HD because it is on the ATA channel and since the Promise BIOS is "set" last there must be another place to assign the bootable drive. Am I right about this?

adamr, This morning I replaced the ribbon cable from the MD to the HD with a new cable but that did not help at all. Does it matter which channel I use on the mother board? I have been trying this on the "blue" colored MB plug. I have not tried the other "black" plug. I am afraid all of this plugging/unplugging will damage something. Do you know of something else I can try? Thanks again

What matters is your boot order. If your HDD is detected by your ultra 100 then you're set to go. win9x *may* require primary master, but winNT/2k/xp will boot off anything. Back to boot order. In your BIOS, make sure that you have it set to boot SCSI or boot "Other"/"future".. or if it has a special option for the ultra 100 use that. Selcting the standard IDE-0 or HDD-0 will not work.

Maybe I am missing something here blake. Since the regular BIOS does not see the hard drive and that is the only hard drive in the system I am not given the option of making that drive the bootable drive. By the way I am using ME. Could that be the problem? The regular BIOS only reports drive A, (the floppy drive) and the CD drive, which is not assigned a letter at that point. When I said that the Ultra BIOS reports the drive, that happens after the orginal BIOS has checked the system. As soon as the Ultra BIOS checks and reports I get a message that I should place a bootable disk in the removable drive, or something to that effect. Since nothing is bootable, I do not get past that point in the post. I do not have a book on the A7V and I can no longer find the detailed drawings, etc. on the Asus site. Thanks

This morning I was able to borrow a manual for the A7V board. After hours of reading and looking I have determined that I have everything set as it should be. The drive is ATA 100 compatable and I am using the correct cable. The only thing I can say now is that the Promise Ultra 100 BIOS on this board must be defective. Thanks for all who helped.