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General discussion

SATA disappears if certain USB ports are used during startup

Apr 12, 2007 6:56AM PDT

I built my first pc using the following;
Asus A8N-SLI SE motherboard
1 gig of corsair value ram
AMD athlon 3200+
wd 160gb caviar se wd1600
seagate barracuda 7200.7 200gb ultra ata st200822a
maxtor diamondmax 10 6v300f0 sata 3.0gb
samsung hd400lj 7200/8m 3gb
running xp pro

During my initial attempt to instal windows on either of my sata drive I received the following error messages;
windows could not start because of a computer disk harware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

I installed xp using my old ata drive and things were fine until I noticed one or both drives will disappear if certain usb ports are in use while rebooting. Is this similar to an IRQ conflict? I don't see any errors in my device manager. I bought vista but thought I should try and solve this issue first so I can run it on a sata drive.

Thanks for your help - I know I need it.

Chris

Discussion is locked

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Very similar.
Apr 12, 2007 7:12AM PDT

I've seen this when the BIOS is very outdated but more often on a clean XP install and the motherboard driver package has not been installed. I can't tell from your post exactly how you installed XP.

Bob

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checking bios next
Apr 12, 2007 8:36AM PDT

Thanks for the reply Bob. I used XP to format the disk during a fresh install. I purchased my motherboard about 6 months ago from ASUS and have their current drivers installed (as of 3 months ago anyway). I will verify this next.