Booting via SATA crazyness

DMZ

DMZ

DMZ

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Joined
30 Jul 2011
Posts
133
Prepare for a story:

Sometimes if I move my SSD to a different SATA port, it won't boot: it will hang on "verifying DMI pool data". That I can accept: it seems like there might be a reason.

But if I immediately move it back to where it was, it won't boot either - hanging in the same place. I can move it to any SATA port and it just won't boot. I can do anything with AHCI and IDE and it still won't boot. This I can't understand. Surely what used to work should work again moments later?

Last time this happened I solved it by initiating a fresh install of Windows (7 x64) and then using the useful repair tool that only ever appears when you pretend you're intalling Windows. You know the one that you can't get to if you choose "Repair" at the first menu?

Anyway this time that didn't work, because Windows couldn't find 8.5GB free on the SSD, which only has 4.5GB free at the moment.

So, game over. That was last time's solution out the window unless I could remember age old command line stuff to move some things to another drive... nope.

So what was the solution today? Well I keep my old copy of XP on another drive, so I hooked that up. Expecting XP to boot (or fail to boot) Windows 7 started up. What the heck?

Can someone explain any part of this? And if there's a way to avoid it in the future: if I can keep a fail-safe something somewhere, please help me out with that too.

Thanks!
 
An update:

Windows asked me to restart so that changes could be applied. I thought "Yes, save this solution" and restarted just after posting. The machine would not boot. What had changed? Nothing, I didn't think.

I didn't touch the SATA connections, but I tried changing the boot order as CDROM was still first from earlier. I tried powering off the XP drive which was still connected in it's SATA dock. Hmm.. what else could I do?

Maybe I'll put the Windows 7 CD back in the drive and give it boot priority but not boot from it, and wait for it to go to the harddrive. Yes, that works.

In fact that seems to be the only way I can boot from the SSD at the moment. Interesting if annoying. So I'd guess that the CD is helping the machine to verify it's DMI Pool data, and it can then boot from the hard drive. Maybe? That would mean something on the harddrive was messed up recently I suppose.

So back to the "any ideas?" question :-)

Thank you!
 
The dmi pool data is a list of your hardware that the BIOS creates and passes onto the OS before it boots up,if you swap SATA ports ect it will upset it,maybe clearing the cmos would help rebuild dmi list
 
Yes it wipes all BIOS settings,make a note of each BIOS page beforehand,write it down or take pics with phone ect,then load optimised defaults in the BIOS and re enter settings,
 
Better than ever!

I actually didn't get round to clearing the CMOS, because as I was going through the BIOS taking pictures, I found a page I hadn't seen before: Hard Disk Boot Priority. Bumping the SSD up to the top of this list makes it work :-)

I often wondered how this was done in SATA. I figured it went by the SATA port numbers.

Thanks for all the help. I'll bear CMOS clearing in mind in future.

And (relating to the other thread on my under-performing SSD) it now boots quickly on AHCI! So not a total waste of several hours :D
 
Ahh yeah,boot order,I didn't know what you originally wanted to do ect

Another thing you can do depending on mb make is press f12 at gigabyte splash screen for boot menu and choose which hdd/ssd you want to boot from,for asus boards its f8,don't know for other boards
 
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