Optiplex 980 Tower Bad SATA 0 port - boot options?

[avsfanco]

Hi All,

I've got an Optiplex 980 tower system that was working great, and then decided to stop booting at the "initializing Intel Boot Agent" screen.

At first I thought it was a bad HD, but pulled it out and put it in an external dock, and it was fine. So I thought it might be the power supply. I had other 980, pulled the PS out and hooked it up, but no change.

Throughout the whole process, the HD showed up just fine in the BIOS, so this whole thing was really puzzling.

So then I decided to move the SATA cable from port 0 to port 1, and it worked!

However, it didn't work with just a regular boot, as I get a notice that it can't find drive 0. So I reboot, hit F12 for the custom boot menu, select the onboard SATA drive, get the same message, but in this case pressing F1 to continue actually works.

So two questions: 1) is there any disadvantage to using port 1 instead of port 0 (other than port 0 is blue, which is nice looking... ), and 2) is there a way to have it boot automatically without having to walk through the manual process to give it a boot sequence?

Thanks!

 

[clutchc]

Assuming the SATA header itself is defective and not the BIOS or chipset...
The system will work fine in any SATA header. SATA doesn't care which header you use. But you may want to enter BIOS and reset the boot order now that the boot drive is in a different SATA header. The BIOS may have a section to select (1) which drive is the 1st HDD, and (2) another to select which drive is the 1st drive to try to boot from.

 

[avsfanco]

Thanks for the reply. The situation has become even stranger. I was able to turn off Drive 0 in the BIOS -- not sure how I missed that before. However, when I tried rebooting, it hung at the "Initializing Intel Boot Agent" screen again. So I hit ctrl-atl-delete again, hit F12, selected internal hard drive, and it booted successfully. Just to check, I then powered off, moved the SATA to port 0 again, re-enabled it in the BIOS, and did the F12 boot successfully. Still fails on a straight boot, though...

Any idea why it would do that, and what would be going on? It seems like it could be a BIOS issue, but it worked fine before, and then one day just stopped...

 

[clutchc]

Check to see if the BIOS is remembering your changes. It might be time to replace the CMOS battery.

 

[avsfanco]

Check to see if the BIOS is remembering your changes. It might be time to replace the CMOS battery.

Changes seem to be remembered just fine, so I don't think that's it, unfortunately.

 

[clutchc]

I wonder if the Intel Boot Agent is the problem? See if this short discussion pertains to you: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1776611/computer-stuck-initializing-intel-boot-agent.html
If so, you may want to Google "intel boot agent" to see if anyone else has come up with a solution for this problem. The quick search I just did, resulted in several hits pertaining to boot issues that revolve around the intel boot agent.

 

[avsfanco]

I wonder if the Intel Boot Agent is the problem? See if this short discussion pertains to you: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1776611/computer-stuck-initializing-intel-boot-agent.html
If so, you may want to Google "intel boot agent" to see if anyone else has come up with a solution for this problem. The quick search I just did, resulted in several hits pertaining to boot issues that revolve around the intel boot agent.

Sheesh. I thought I had done this, but apparently hadn't. The boot sequence had the "Onboard network controller" listed. It was the last device, so it shouldn't have made any difference, but when I completely removed it from the sequence, all problems went away.

The funny thing is that when the problem first came up, I searched and found the same article, but only moved it to the end and didn't remove it. Since the problem persisted, I forgot about that as a possible solution. Then, once I removed it, the problem was gone.

Thanks for prompting me to revisit the original possible solution -- just didn't take it far enough the first time.

Thanks again!

 

[clutchc]

That's why they always say, "two heads are better than one". ;-)
Congrats. Hope that was the issue.