Member Avatar for slacke

Does anybody experience problems with this motherboard:
ASUS p8h67-m pro
1xHDD 320G
1xHDD 1000G

Both are connected to the SATA6G ports and the disks supports 6G/sec speed. I install win7 on it. The problem is the next:
No matter what I do the MS win7 always recognise the 1000G HDD as disk0 and 320G as disk1. I need to have a separate HDD for windows7 and for data.
The reason for two disks is that the actual system is a Digital Video Recording server which does a lot of disk operations on the HDD wich contains video-data. Because of this several hard-disks already failed and we always need to replace the system disk.

Unfortunately I cannot force windows to use the 320G HDD as disk0. The result of this is that win7 puts the boot partition (system reserved 100M partition) on the 1000G HDD. This causes a problem when the 1000G HDD is replaced the OS cannot boot up.

Additionaly, the HDDs are randomly not recognised by themotherboard.
1. No cable problems are present (data and power)
2. The BIOS is updated to the latest.
3. The HDDs are connected correctly to the 6G/s SATA ports
4. The HDDs are OK. (I made an extended SMART self test with no errors)

The HW vendor told me that they do not know about any bug for this motherboard.
Did anybody encountered any similar issue with this hardware or with win7 installation (i mean the boot partition)

Have a nice day to all of you :)

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by zxor 2

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Quick practical summary and a few reliable ways to stop Windows from putting the boot files on the wrong drive (and what to do if it already did). The easiest, lowest-risk move is the “one-drive-only during install” approach mentioned by and , but there are safe alternatives (pre-create the system partition) and repair steps if Windows already put the System/Boot files on the other disk. The behaviour where setup will place boot files on the first/firmware-selected disk is common—plan for it rather than fight it. (learn.microsoft.com)

If you want to guarantee the OS + boot files land on a specific disk without unplugging other drives, boot the installer, press Shift+F10, then use DiskPart to preformat and mark the system partition active before you run the GUI installer. Example (careful: clean erases the selected disk — back up first):

diskpart
list disk
select disk X          (confirm X is the target OS disk)
clean                  (DESTROYS data on X)
create partition primary size=100
format fs=ntfs quick
active
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
assign letter=C
exit

Creating the partition manually prevents the installer from creating the 100MB “System Reserved” somewhere else. (learn.microsoft.com)

If Windows is already installed but the small System/Boot partition is on the other drive, create or assign a letter to a system partition on the desired disk and copy the boot files there with bcdboot, then set the motherboard to boot that disk first in UEFI/BIOS:

bcdboot C:\Windows /s S:

(Replace S: with the letter you assigned to the target system partition; run this from an elevated repair prompt.) After that, use the BIOS boot order to make the OS disk primary. (learn.microsoft.com)

A few hardware notes for the P8H67-M PRO: connect the OS disk to the board’s native Intel SATA 6Gb/s ports (check the manual for which headers those are), not a third-party SATA controller; third‑party controllers sometimes behave differently at boot. If drives vanish intermittently, try swapping SATA cables/PSU connectors, test one drive at a time in the Intel ports, verify AHCI mode, and keep images/backups for the DVR workload. (manualslib.com)

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for rubberman
  1. Remove the 1TB disc, and install Windows on the 320GB disc.
  2. Re-install the 1TB disc.

At this point, the correct disc should be booted by Windows.

These sort of problems are usually due to what disc responds first to the OS scanning of the hardware. On Linux, you can fix that by partioning the drives giving them labels, and then telling the OS to use the labelled partions as you wish.

Member Avatar for zxor 2

ok do this ...take it and break it back down ...look on the mother board make sure u havethe right connectors attached ..now reinstall or ghost the hard drive with win 7 and connect only that drive first ...then connect the 2nd drive after that has been done.

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