System won't load OS when secondary drive is plugged into ASMedia controller.

[Bullitt]

I'm at my wits end here. I've had this system for many years, its been extremely rock solid since its system build but I'm running into an issue that I just can't wrap my head around.

System:
MSI Z77A-GD65 Bios v.8.1.50.1456 (most current)
Intel I7-3770K (not overclocked)
32GB Corsair RAM DDR3-1600
Sandisk Ultra-II 480GB SSD - Attached to Intel SATA-3 Controller port 0
Toshiba platter drive -- Attached to Intel Sata-3 Controller port 1

With this configuration, this system just works. I upgraded from a 250gb SSD about a year ago, did a fresh install of Win10 (not upgrade) to the current Sandisk 480gb drive. All is good. The old 250 SSD was sitting in my parts bin.

I have this old 250gb SSD that I was going to install on the Asmedia Sata3 ports on the motherboard, but when I do that, the system will boot, but not load to the OS. The system POSTs correctly, the drives are recognized in the BIOS correctly, but it will not load the operating system. When I unplug the extra drive from the ASmedia controller, all is well. The system boots to the operation system without a hitch.



Using the Windows disk manager snap-in and an external USB->SATA converter, I have deleted all volumes off the secondary SSD, removed existing partitions, and formatted to NTFS. When I plug this drive into the ASmedia controller, I the system will just not boot to the OS. I've attempted to force the BIOS into using the specific Sandisk Ultra-II using the boot options and manual boot (F11 in this case) option upon startup, but it just won't hit the OS with this secondary drive installed.

What am I missing here?

 

[pendragon1]

disable all boot devices in the bios except for your primary ssd. make sure there is no extra setting for the asmedia like raid, make sure its just ahci/sata mode. try the drive in place of the Toshiba.

 

[Bullitt]

disable all boot devices in the bios except for your primary ssd. make sure there is no extra setting for the asmedia like raid, make sure its just ahci/sata mode. try the drive in place of the Toshiba.

I'll attempt that. I had my boot devices set to 1 HDD, 1 optical, and USB. Nothing more.
RAID was disabled, I never trusted software raid, but then again, I'm old and used to old hardware which sucked.
All devices were set to AHCI mode, that was a lesson I learned 8 or so years ago.

I'm not really comfortable physically disabling my platter drive. It's where all my /%program files%/ are stored, I'm just not comfortable enough to know that Windows won't nuke something if that isnt there....

 

[pendragon1]

this the board? can you not use one of the other ports(whats what, b/w?)? there seem to be tons!


edit: I guess white is sata 3 so is one set onboard the other the asmedia? you should be able to move your spinner to a black sata2 port and it work just fine. then put the ssd on the sata 3. heck it would/should work fine on the sata2 just not as fast...

 

[Bullitt]

this the board? can you not use one of the other ports(whats what, b/w?)? there seem to be tons!
edit: I guess white is sata 3 so is one set onboard the other the asmedia? you should be able to move your spinner to a black sata2 port and it work just fine. then put the ssd on the sata 3. heck it would/should work fine on the sata2 just not as fast...

Yeah,. there are tons of ports (one of the reasons I went with the board). The z77 chipset only supported 2 SATA-III connections and the other 2 SATA-III connectors were add-ons. I have a distrust of add-on ports because they typically don't perform as well as chipset mfg ports. When I built the system, I did benchmark my SSD on the ASmedia ports and it came up slightly worse than the Intel ports.

My original build had 1 SSD, 2 platter HDDs and 2 optical. I put the HDD on the Intel SATA-III port 1 interface because I can't do math (confused the MB/sec with Mb/sec for damn near 4 years now) and thought the peak read speed of the platter drive exceeded SATA-II and I wanted the most I could get. Running the maths again, that platter drive tops out at 156MB/sec read speed which is FAR below SATA-II.

So, a bit paranoid about what would happen if I changed ports (would windows not associate my partitions properly) I wanted to use the ASmedia ports for my spare SSD. What I really needed to do was to blast away any partitions on that spare SSD. I should have run it through a 'nix bootable environment and blasted away the SSD with parted or something, but I was lazy and used Windows disk management.

At the end of the day, I did move my platter drive to a SATA-II port and nothing bad happened. I installed my spare/old SSD to the onboard Intel Sata-III port 1 and the system boots properly, I have the speed potential of the old SSD. I'll futz around with the ASMedial ports at a future time. Either those ports are bad, or I had something stuck in a partition table that windows disk management just won't remove.

 

[Lourens de Beer]

I'm at my wits end here. I've had this system for many years, its been extremely rock solid since its system build but I'm running into an issue that I just can't wrap my head around.

System:
MSI Z77A-GD65 Bios v.8.1.50.1456 (most current)
Intel I7-3770K (not overclocked)
32GB Corsair RAM DDR3-1600
Sandisk Ultra-II 480GB SSD - Attached to Intel SATA-3 Controller port 0
Toshiba platter drive -- Attached to Intel Sata-3 Controller port 1

With this configuration, this system just works. I upgraded from a 250gb SSD about a year ago, did a fresh install of Win10 (not upgrade) to the current Sandisk 480gb drive. All is good. The old 250 SSD was sitting in my parts bin.

I have this old 250gb SSD that I was going to install on the Asmedia Sata3 ports on the motherboard, but when I do that, the system will boot, but not load to the OS. The system POSTs correctly, the drives are recognized in the BIOS correctly, but it will not load the operating system. When I unplug the extra drive from the ASmedia controller, all is well. The system boots to the operation system without a hitch.



Using the Windows disk manager snap-in and an external USB->SATA converter, I have deleted all volumes off the secondary SSD, removed existing partitions, and formatted to NTFS. When I plug this drive into the ASmedia controller, I the system will just not boot to the OS. I've attempted to force the BIOS into using the specific Sandisk Ultra-II using the boot options and manual boot (F11 in this case) option upon startup, but it just won't hit the OS with this secondary drive installed.

What am I missing here?

I had the same problem.....battled for more than a year now to find a solution. So after months of frastration a MSI tech at last gave me the new BETA update for the MSI Z77A-GD65 board and whalla!!!!!!!!!!! it works......It updated the BIOS to V10.12B3 and everything works just fine.
I can now plug in any drive in the ASMEDIA SATA 7 or 8 ports and they work, and even Windows 10 the very latest update see the drives!

At first a battle to get the BIOS Flash done, didn't want to work.....then I was told to put the PC off, the clear the CMOS totally, then unplugged ALL SATA drives, all of them. Then start and Update BIOS via M-FLASH. Only after full flash the PC will restart, obviously it will ask for a boot device because not is plugged in. Hard shut down, plugged back all drives, restarted and within 20 seconds I was in Windows again.

Feel like a mountain lifted from my shoulders.

Will see if this also sorted the occasional Windows Freezing also.

 

[Bullitt]

I had the same problem.....battled for more than a year now to find a solution. So after months of frastration a MSI tech at last gave me the new BETA update for the MSI Z77A-GD65 board and whalla!!!!!!!!!!! it works......It updated the BIOS to V10.12B3 and everything works just fine.
I can now plug in any drive in the ASMEDIA SATA 7 or 8 ports and they work, and even Windows 10 the very latest update see the drives!

At first a battle to get the BIOS Flash done, didn't want to work.....then I was told to put the PC off, the clear the CMOS totally, then unplugged ALL SATA drives, all of them. Then start and Update BIOS via M-FLASH. Only after full flash the PC will restart, obviously it will ask for a boot device because not is plugged in. Hard shut down, plugged back all drives, restarted and within 20 seconds I was in Windows again.

Feel like a mountain lifted from my shoulders.

Will see if this also sorted the occasional Windows Freezing also.

Jeezus H Tap Dancing Christ.....
What a necro, but at least, thank you for providing some possible insight into my issue.

I ended up with the more common solution of "Doing the F'ing math" and realizing that I wasn't bottlenecking my platter drives on my sata 2.0 ports (I got confused with Gigabits vs Gigabytes per sec which is incredibly silly given my profession for the past 17 years) and my final solution was to move my bulk storage drives to my Sata 2.0 ports, thus freeing up the native Sata 3.0 ports for my secondary SATA drive.

One of these days, I might upgrade to a modern system, but until I see the need (and frankly, I don't) I'll play around with the drive configuration with the beta bios that you suggested.

Thank man, I had frankly, given up at this time.


Edit: In case anyone found this thread, its now 9 months since this last post and I don't feel like bumping it.

My issue has been directly attributed to the GPT partitioning on my original SSD (which got plugged into my ASMedia ports, and subsequently removed). I installed a new SSD and could not boot from that drive no matter what, until I discovered the GPT schema. Windows repair was of no help, the only clue was when I attempted to fresh install Windows on the new drive, the GUI/Wizard said it couldn't be installed because it (new SSD) wasn't GPT partitioned. Low level partition wipe on the old drive, fresh GPT partitioning on the new drive, all is good.