Sata drive not recognized by bios on cold boot

sgunnone wrote: I have an H77M-ITX motherboard, and I upgraded the two drives I run as a mirror to new Seagate Ironwolf 10TB drives (ST10000VN0004), and the drive on Sata0 is not recognized on cold (power on) boot, but the drive on Sata1 is, always. If I swap the cables from one drive to another, it is still Sata0 that is not recognized, so there is nothing wrong with the drives per-se. Once the machine is on, if I reset/reboot it, the drive on Sata0 is now recognized, always.  The issue only occurs during power on. I have replaced the Sata cables, with no change in behavior.  The old drives work fine, and are always recognized. I'm running them in AHCI mode, which is what I want to do for performance. I've upgraded to the latest bios version, 1.9. If I had to guess, the drives are somehow taking a little too long to respond when first powered on for the bios to be happy, but I really don't know. I raised an issue through the ASRock form about 10 days ago, but aside from the automated response have not heard anything. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Issues like this, given all you have tried to fix it that was not the problem and your description of the drive's behavior, are very difficult to even identify, as well as fix if that is possible.

The 10TB drive is just not recognized in the BIOS, but it is recognized in Windows when it boots?

What version of Windows are you using? Yes there is a reason I am asking.

Do you know which AHCI SATA driver you are using?

I assume the 10TB drives are GPT partitioned?

Is your OS installation UEFI booting or Legacy booting?

Since it is isolated to the SATA3_0 port, and using either of the 10TB HDDs, your guess about the drive not having enough time to get started during POST is probably correct. Actually, you may be lucky that POST passes for the 10TB drive on the SATA3_0 port, instead of failing without booting the OS.

Drive testing during POST is the last thing done in POST, to allow for the drives to wake up. Older boards had an option in the BIOS to set a delay time in seconds (up to 30 seconds) to allow HDDs to get started and stabilize before they were initialized in POST. Newer boards don't have that option, and have much faster starting, due to their UEFI firmware. So less time for HDDs to get started.

Did you try using one of the SATA II ports for one of the 10TB drives?

Your board's manual does not include a Fast Boot option, but manuals are not always kept up to date with UEFI/BIOS updates. Are you using the Fast Boot option?

There may be nothing that can be done about this issue, except moving the drive to a different SATA port.

sgunnone wrote: Thank you for your reply.  In a funny way, very helpful. I'm using UEFI, and both of the drives are on the Sata II ports.  The OS is FreeBSD, there is no Windows on the box. I spent a fair amount of time building the OS to utilize the mirror array, (I'm booting from a different drive) figuring I'd solve the drive not recognized issue later, not realizing it would be hard to solve.  Which made me reluctant to just boot it, as I was afraid that I would then be looking at a 10TB mirror rebuilding itself once it again saw two drives. But, after your email, I went in and disabled the mirror, so the OS wouldn't try to assemble and mount it, and then just cold booted the machine. And guess what?  Both drives were recognized by the OS.  So I'm a pretty happy camper. And thanks for your reply, because you asked the question as to whether Windows would recognize it even though the BIOS did not, I went down that path, which I probably should have done before, but didn't. Thanks again!

Great, I had a feeling there was at least a detail or two that might be related to the issue. Might have something to do with the experience of dealing with questions with varying degress of detail.

In your case, I wasn't to confident that I'd get any more clues, but you never know. We all take things for granted, or think they don't matter... but as I have learned, everything matters.

Plus you taught me something too, so thanks for that!

Stettin wrote: I joined up to report the same issue with my Sata_0 port on this board. I'm pretty sure I had this issue when I first got the board and forgot about it because my hard drive and DVD are on 2 & 3 right now. I tried adding my SSD to 0 it wouldn't show up. After flipping my cables around it became obvious it was a port issue. I never tried booting to the OS because I was attempting to clone my hard drive to the SSD. It is definitely annoying behavior. I also noticed an odd quirk in that I couldn't select my hard drive as a boot device with the SSD on Sata_1. I'm not sure what the deal is, but I intend to boot to the SSD anyway so I'll probably not mess around with it any more as long as the clone is successful.