Problem adding Hard drives to my system

[RobertEnglund]

i'm not sure if the problem is related to my motherboard or not. I've got 5 HD's in my case.
3 of them are IDE and the other 2 are SATA
and I have one IDE DVD burner

if i try to connect all of them directly into my motherboard, my system will not load up. It will turn on and then recognize all the hard drives are there but right before it starts up windows, it just freezes and i have to restart it.

i put in a sata controller card and an IDE controller card and i connected both of my sata's into the the sata controller card and i have one IDE HD connected into the IDE controller card. And in this particular set up, my computer boots up into windows just fine.

My question is this, does anyone know why i need to have this particular set up instead of just being able to connect all my drives directly into my motherboard without the use of controller cards? I'm definitely going to be buying more HD's in the future and i'm going to hit a limit of being able to add anymore without encountering the same problem again with the boot up process. :?:

 

[pscowboy]

Your not telling us the facts.

Give the forum ALL of your hardware specs, so an informed decision can be made.

 

[RobertEnglund]

i'm pretty sure it's not the PSU
it's a 500w Ultra X-Finity which is know to handle a lot more and is very realiable. I actually had a 400w generic one in there that came with the case and it was giving the same problems and figured it was the PSU so i ordered the Ultra one and same exact still is happening.




CPU Type Intel Pentium 4, 2400 MHz (18 x 133)
CPU Alias Northwood, A80532
Motherboard Name ECS P4M800-M / Epox EP-4VKMI
RAM 1.5gb
one Optiarc DVD-RW AD-7170A
Generic 80gb IDE HD 5400rpm
two 400gb PATA Seagate Barracudas 7200.10
one 300gb SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.09
one 400gb SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 (Goes is my AGP slot)
a cheap 10 dollar sound card
one silicon valley IDE controller card
one silicon valley SATA controller card
2 80mm antec fans
and one 120mm fan

the fans were added after I had all the HD's and everything else in there and I noticed one of them was running a little hot so I put them in with no problem.

 

[pscowboy]

The Ultras are not great power supplies. That one is barely passable in quality by todays' demands, and may not be giving you enough supply.

 

[qrhetoric]

I have a feeling it's a bios setting. Check that the sata drives are being recognized properly. If they're all showing, try playing with the setting, such as putting them in run as IDE mode. I had to do something like that with my Asus board. You can also try saving your settings and choosing default stability settings.

While I think that will resolve it, if it doesn't, you should attempt to troubleshoot by disconnecting all drives except for the boot drive, and seeing if it boots.

 

[chunkymonster]

Motherboard Name ECS P4M800-M / Epox EP-4VKMI

So which mobo is it?

I agree, probably a BIOS setting between which boots first, IDE devices or SATA devices. Depending on the mobo you have, it may prefer SATA over IDE as the main boot device but is something that you should be able to determine with the correct BIOS settings.

 

[RobertEnglund]

the motherboard is a pcchips p25g
it probably is the settings
and Ultra PSUs aren't that reliable, but this particular model that's in my case is extremely reliable and a known trust worthy PSU

and i'm not sure if it's a boot device issue but i'll try that out. i've tinkered with it before and it seemed to insist on a certain order.

other than that, any other theory on what the problem might be? it could be that i just have a crapfest of a motherboard.

 

[RobertEnglund]

what is it exactly that i'm suppose to do to my bios? what are the steps/where do I go once i'm in my bios.