Hello new friends

A somewhat long story, but I am loosing sleep over this one.
I have this very weird problem after purchasing a second, identical sata drive. Mobo= MSI Neo FSR v2 / IDE = NEC DVD rewriter / Sata = 2 Samsungs 2504C, BIOS = latest AwardPhoenix.

Everything worked fine until I bought the second Sata drive. I now have 2 satas connected on mobo, and the DVD on IDE0 as a master.

No matter what I try, those three drives attached and my PC won't even go into P.O.S.T. after turning on. Just a black screen, no messages whatsoever and after 4 to 20 seconds it powers off.

When I pull the power cord off the DVD, systems boots fine and I see both SATAs in XP Explorer. Same thing with DVD and first SATA attached, no problems. Even works when I boot with 1xDVD and 1xSATA, and then after I plug in the second SATA (love hotswappable), everything runs smoothly. I just cannot get it to boot with all three drives attached at boot time. Once again, no error messages, no HD-spin up, just black, and power off. I can't even enter BIOS that way.

I tried the following: changed boot sequence order, changed HD boot order withing boot sequence, turned IDE and SATA controllers off and back on... I spent two nights in my BIOS.

Please help, I am almost ready to buy a USB DVD writer and pray that I can boot from that thing, should the need ever arise.

Much appreciated.

sounds like having 3 drives is drawing too much juice. you may need to upgrade your power supply

Should have foreseen that answer by mentioning it's a brand new 430 W Antec power supply. I have no other peripherals attached except those three drives and the mobo itself, no GPU-fans, no USB devices etc. Also it doesn't explain why all three drives run fine after initiall startup.

ok thats wierd.. Maybe your BIOS is getting confused and cant decide which HDD to boot from?

Yups James, that's my own opinion also. The problem is only trying to find out where and how it gets confused?

i used to have a server that had both SCSI and IDE drives and i could never use both at the same time as it would cause it to say "error selecting boot device" on POST. Maybe a similar problem?

Refer to your motherboard manual and take a closer look at the boot order in the BIOS to see whether you can explicitly specifify the drive arrangement

Not much experience with SATA... but found refrences to issues with that motherboard on SATA slots #1-#2. Suggest you try the two SATA slots #3-#4 closest to cpu..
regards,
PV