PC won't boot unless I select the drive manually

[cemonal]

Hi. I just bought an AMD R9 290 GPU, and because it wouldn't fit my previous case, I also bought a new case. I removed the hardware from the previous case, and installed it all in the new one, as well as the new GPU. I don't think I made any mistake assembling.

When I power up my PC, however, it gets stuck in the BIOS splash screen, and I don't see the Windows logo. But if I enter the BIOS menu, and manually select a drive to boot from there by pressing F8, the PC boots up fine.

This problem isn't just with my HDD and Windows. When I try to boot using Windows Installation disc or a Recovery Disc, I see the "Press a key too boot in 5 seconds" message for a split second, before the screen turns black and again it gets stuck.

I've tried resetting my BIOS settings to default from the menu and by pulling out the battery from the motherboard. When I went into System Recovery, Windows automatically found some problem with startup and fixed it, but nothing changed. I also did the Startup Repair, FixMbr, FixBoot, and RebuildBcd options from here. I checked the HDD for errors using Glary Utilities.

I'm not sure if it's related or not, but the ethernet adapter stopped working as well. It doesn't show up in the device manager, and when I tried to reinstall the Realtek drivers, it told me "Realtek Network Controller was not found."

My specs are:
Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 LE
CPU: Intel i5 2500
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate SP 1
HDD: ST31000524AS ATA

Thank you.

 

[getochkn]

Sure you plugged your HD back into the same SATA port?

 

[ronintexas]

This has happened on a few of my builds - you need to check a couple of things - first, make sure the hard drive is in the same SATA port as the original build - second - double check the cabling to all drives including optical drives. A loose cable or a drive in a different spot can create this issue.

 

[cemonal]

Sure you plugged your HD back into the same SATA port?

MB layout

I plugged the HDD in the port I highlighted in yellow, the one labeled "11". The DVD drive is plugged in the one right next to it. But I'm not really sure whether this was the same way before or not.

 

[cemonal]

This has happened on a few of my builds - you need to check a couple of things - first, make sure the hard drive is in the same SATA port as the original build - second - double check the cabling to all drives including optical drives. A loose cable or a drive in a different spot can create this issue.

To be clear, the first option. Are you saying that the HDD must be plugged into the previous port, even though there are other ports which are just as compatible? Or are you saying that I may have plugged the HDD into an incompatible port?

Should I just try plugging it into all the SATA ports by turn?

 

[ronintexas]

Some BIOS will setup the boot drive as defined by the port it was plugged into - this is why it was asked about the port it was plugged into.

You can go into your BIOS and reselect the boot drive and save the setup - that may fix the problem.

 

[cemonal]

Okay, plugging the HDD into a different port solved the problem. It's booting fine now. Thank you very much.