BIOS changes Boot Info when external drives are attached

[pixeldroid]

I have a new system w/ASUS SABERTOOTH X58 mobd and 240.0 GB Kingston HyperX SSD as the main drive. Purchased in Sept.
The SSD is set as the first drive in the boot order of the BIOS. However, if there are external drives attached at boot time, the boot order dumps the SSD completely and fills the slots w/the attached drives and CD! Then of course I get "Insert bootable disk" and no bootup. For the last week I've been under the assumption that the SSD was failing until I discovered that this is happening.
I shut down my computer every nite and would prefer not to have to disconnect my various backup drives and memory stix every day.
Anyone know a fix?
Thanks much.

 

[inzone]

There are two places in the bios where you can list the drives for booting and I believe with the Asus bios if you go to where you choose the boot sequence just under that there is an option for selecting the storage devices or disk drives , if in that option you list the drive with the OS first and then put the cd or dvd drive second and other or removable as third then when you go to the boot sequence and put the SSD as the first boot device and the dvd second and other or removable as third. I would think that it should stay that way. Do you have AHCI selected and the most recent bios installed.

 

[GhislainG]

You could hibernate the system instead of shutting it down.

 

[pixeldroid]

Thanks for the replies:
@GhislainG
I run a lot of software for graphics/animation creation. Even w/Win7, I find that the system gets funky, so I'd prefer to shutdown and rebuild completely.

@inzone.
I found the storage device section and when I added the external drive, it rebooted correctly. However I have several externals, and after changing the config and rebooting, it became messed up again, though not on the first try.
As it turns out, I don't have the latest BIOS installed. I downloaded the latest BIOS, installed the BIOS updater, and backed up the current BIOS, however, I haven't updated a BIOS before: Do I need to be concerned about losing settings before I do that?
As for AHCI, the manual
states that it should be set from the 'Main' screen, but when I look at that screen, no SATA Devices are listed.
In BIOS/Advanced/Onboard Devices, the Marvell 9128 Controller is set to IDE. The other 2 options are Disabled and AHCI. I'm not familiar with these settings, but looking around the web, it appears that I would need to be make adjustments to the registry if I want to enable AHCI.
Do you suggest switching to AHCI?

Also, another problem has cropped up, I created a separate post , but I've become suspicious that these problems are realted to a recent addition of 2 WD Passport 1T external USB3 drives which I use for backup.
At the Seagate website, someone else identified the bootup problem with one of their drives.
Any other suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanks again.