Annoying BIOS error message

gbdtil1

gbdtil1

gbdtil1

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Joined
24 Mar 2006
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219
Hi all,

Just built a new rig for a mate of mine with the following components:

E6700 C2D
Asus p5k Premium wifi
Seagate Barracuda 250 gig HD
Etc, Etc

As stated, this is a brand new build with a fresh install of Windows xp Professional.

On Posting I get the following error message:

'No IDE HDD Detected - press F1 to continue'

On pressing F1 to continue, the system boots fine into Windows and all is fine and dandy.

Does anyone know what causes this message and how can it be eliminated please.

Thanks :)
 
Its sata 2 and the error message is actually:

NO IDE MASTER HDD DETECTED. PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE.

I cannot see a jumper on the hdd and don't know what the relevance is in any event. Is there just a setting in the bios that I need to disable?

I also had the same error message occur in another build about a year ago and that was with a P5K Wifi deluxe.

I have built machines with a P5K combo and more recently a X38 Maximus Formula and not had this message.

Any clues?
 
You need to either set the SATA to IDE compatibility mode (from memory) in the bios, or when you start installing windows you need to press one of the F keys when it asks if you want to install a third party RAID driver.

XP has no native support for SATA, and either needs the motherboard/drive controller to pretend it's an IDE drive, or have the drivers available on a floppy (Vista has basic SATA drivers as standard I think, and can also get them from usb memory stick or optical drive).

You may also need to disable IDE as a bootable drive in either the main bios, or the secondary bios that the IDE additional SATA ports use (they are provided by a third party rather than in the main chipset, and as such are dealt with separately).
 
there should be an option in the BIOS that says "Halt on" listing Floppy and Keyboard missing.

yours must have the option for IDE HDD too.

Werewolf said:
You need to either set the SATA to IDE compatibility mode (from memory) in the bios, or when you start installing windows you need to press one of the F keys when it asks if you want to install a third party RAID driver.

XP has no native support for SATA, and either needs the motherboard/drive controller to pretend it's an IDE drive, or have the drivers available on a floppy (Vista has basic SATA drivers as standard I think, and can also get them from usb memory stick or optical drive).

You may also need to disable IDE as a bootable drive in either the main bios, or the secondary bios that the IDE additional SATA ports use (they are provided by a third party rather than in the main chipset, and as such are dealt with separately).
Click to expand...

:confused: rubbish. the BIOS does not need SATA to be in IDE compat. mode to allow native SATA HDDs. XP will install straight to a fresh SATA HDD without needing drivers, especially not RAID ones.
 
Last edited:
I was getting this error and still havent fixed it completly but i got rid of the message by going (in BIOS) to Boot > Boot Configuration and setting the Wait for 'F1' If Error setting to disabled.

your bios layout may be different though
 
Aod said:
there should be an option in the BIOS that says "Halt on" listing Floppy and Keyboard missing.

yours must have the option for IDE HDD too.



:confused: rubbish. the BIOS does not need SATA to be in IDE compat. mode to allow native SATA HDDs. XP will install straight to a fresh SATA HDD without needing drivers, especially not RAID ones.
Click to expand...

If you notice the first part of my reply was based on the windows XP problems with SATA (which was a mistake on my part when first reading the original post) :)
I've not come across an XP install that will work straight to SATA drives without either a bios setting which makes them appear as IDE in some manner* to windows, or a driver.
My P4P for example will make the main SATA ports appear as Third IDE Primary and Forth IDE Primary to let XP install on them without additional drivers*.
Set them to RAID mode and you then need additional drivers.

That however is probably irrelvent to this problem as I realised when I put in the latter part of my original post:)

However it's got to be a bios problem given the timing of the message, in which case the latter part of my first post applies, the need to stop the relevent controller from looking for an IDE drive, which means either the machines main BIOS, or if it's got something like a SIS, Promise or other third party chip giving it additional drive controllers compared to those on the main chipset it is likely to have a secondary bootable bios for that (which the main bios hands over to for a check).

I would check the boot order to make sure it's not referencing any IDE disks in the boot order, or any "raid" controllers (I can't remember how exactly they often refer to them, probably "additional driver controller" or "raid controller).
If it's referencing a raid controller or similar the op may need to enter an onboard secondary drive/raid controller's bios (they tend to have their own mini bios to allow them to be bootable, in the same way that SCSI/raid expansion cards do).

To access the secondary (raid) bios, if it's there you normally have to let the system boot past the main bios then when it mentions something about "promise" "high point" or "sis" hit F4 or whatever key it asks for.


*It's making them appear in a backwards compatibility mode for ease of use (SATA wasn't around when XP was developed so has no drivers on the standard XP disk, hence the fudge on things like Intel chipsets with integrated SATA).
 
Werewolf said:
space-saving-snip
Click to expand...

Hmmm, interesting.
i've made 5 systems in the past few months which had only SATA drives (even optical) and i didn't set the SATA to IDE compt. mode in the bios for any of them, and XP Pro SP1 went on fine, without issue/drivers. the drives were in JBOD configuration with a array size of 1.

all of the systems were either on the nVidia 590 or Intel P35 chipset.
 
thanks for all the input guys.

I've fixed it now. It was as simple as moving the sata lead to sata port 1 in stead of sata port 3 as I accidentally had it! School boy error but got there in the end!

Cheers anyway

;)
 
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