My first question, so I hope this is the right section.

I have an ECS A780GM motherboard which has 5 SATA connections - I need 6. I used a PCI 2 port SATA card with 2 SATA DVD R/W's attached with no problem, but I now need to free up a PCI slot. So, I bought a PCI-e 2 port SATA card, similar to http://www.syba.com/Product/Info/Id/4

Installation no problem and all BIOSes updated successfully to the latest versions etc. BUT..... if I boot my system with any drive connected to the new card, I get a "load bootable media" error message. If I boot my system with NO drives connected to the new card, I can start XP as normal. SATA "hot swap" means I can connect drives after XP has booted but that hardly seems to be an ideal solution!

It seems that the new card is hi-jacking the boot order I have set in the motherboard BIOS and the motherboard BIOS seems to have no way of excluding the new card at boot time!!

Has anyone encountered a similar problem? If so, is there a solution?

Your card should have it's own BIOS POST entry (like Ctrl-S or something) or a Windows configuration utility that should be able to turn off the boot function.

Thanks for the idea. I had loaded the non-RAID BIOS into the card, which gives pretty well no control etc. I therefore loaded the RAID BIOS and installed the Windows app for controlling the card and attached drives. But I still cannot prevent the boot failure when any drives are connected. I even changed so that I was running HDD's off the card, on the basis that I might have more success with RAID manipulation. Still no joy. I can set the drives to be either "ordinary drives" (ie no RAID functionality at all) or JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives which may or may not be part of a RAID set). Either way, if I connect the cables after Windows has started, they are usable in Windows Explorer and their status is correctly set when I use the Silicon Image RAID utility.

I have used the motherboard BIOS to specifically exclude these drives from the boot order - the only bootable device is my original RAID set attached to the motherboard.

I can try moving the RAID set from which I boot at the moment to the new card, although I can't be sure that the method of implementing RAID will be the same and that they will be readable by a different controller chip. I cannot reinstall Windows, unless I am prepared to loose the facility to boot from a RAID set in the future: I will have to connect a CD-Rom to the new card to install from and that's one of the two SATA ports gone.

One thing - if I attempt to boot with drives attached to the new card, I get a "Checking NVRAM" message on screen for a second (or less). This suggests that the new card is somehow changing the BIOS but not in a permanent way - if I go into BIOS setup next time around, the boot order is as I would have wished.

I guess some problems just don't get solved - it's what helps keep hardware manufacturers in business!!