System Forgetting Correct Boot Drive

[dclark]

We are running 5 SATA drives on the ASUS P8P67. Intermittently, when the computer is powered up, it attempts to boot from one of the drives that is not a boot drive, and leaves us with a blank black screen following the BIOS screen. To get things working again, I have to enter into BIOS, choose the boot order setting and remove all drives except the correct boot drive from this list. This succeeds in getting the computer up and running, but the problem inevitably returns somewhere down the line. ASUS had us remove the motherboard battery but this did not correct the problem. Running Windows XP Pro 32 bit. Thanks, hoping someone has an idea about what's causing this.

 

[itzdanielp]

Did you try changing the battery?

The battery you mention is to save changes to the BIOS when the computer is powered off. If it is losing power it could be causing the BIOS to forget which one.

Also, what kind of PSU are you using? 5 SATA drives pull a decent amount of power, and if your PSU is not up to the task it could not be entirely spun up when it tries to boot, so it skips to the next drive.