Boot order and external drive issues

[xenon20]

Hi

I have a gigabyte Z87X-UD3H mobo which seems to be loosing the boot order. Sometimes when I turn on the machine it'll boot straight into windows 7, but other times it says something like "please reboot and select proper boot device".

Currently when this message appears I am going into BIOS and setting the boot order and then saving and exiting which will sort the problem for that boot, or sometimes a couple of boots but then it will loose the config and boot order again. Am I missing something? I am using the latest BIOS version (F7).

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My second issue that I've been having is that sometimes when I boot into windows, my external drive isn't listed in my computer but it shows in the device manager. I keep getting a window pop up saying "you need to format the drive in drive :F before you can use it". Up till now I have been safely removing the hardware and then reconnecting it to get the drive to show up.

I started to think that my external drive had some bad sectors or was on it's last legs. I ran a WD diagnostics extended test last night which passed and said that the SMART status of the drive is fine. Any ideas why the external drive isn't always recognized ?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Xenon

 

[xenon20]

Hi

Moving the SSD boot drive to just above the CD/DVD optical drive in boot order priority, did the trick.

I did reorder the boot sequence in the BIOS so that my windows SSD was no1 and my cd drive was no2 and then saved and exit. It would boot correctly but then when powering on the machine next time, I would have to go back into the BIOS where it had reordered my cd drive as no1 and my windows SSD as no5 (last). Had a search on google but couldn't find anyone with the same issue.

Chap at work said I should try and remove all the other drives from the boot list but I can't see how to do that in my gigabyte BIOS ? Any idea's how I make the boot list just contain the SSD and the cd drive?

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When I first got the "you need to format the drive in drive :F before you can use it" message, I backed everything up onto another external drive and then formatted the disk as NTFS and then moved all of my data back, and now the problem has re-appeared so I don't think formatting it helped