[SambizelFoRizzel]

Motherboard or Hard drive?

Let me start by thanking you in advance for your time. I am a junior builder and appreciate your time. I'm working on a timeline and any immediate help would be great! I'll take what I can get though!

Here is the build:
Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor
EVGA E758-TR LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
COOLER MASTER Hyper N 520 CPU Cooler
Acer X233Hbid Black 23" 5ms HDMI Full 1080P Widescreen LCD Monitor
G.SKILL 12GB (6 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory
CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W Power Supply
COOLER MASTER HAF 932 case
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive x4
Sony Optiarc 24X DVD/CD Rewritable Drive Black SATA Model AD-7240S-0B x4
ASUS Xonar D1 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Card
PNY Quadro FX1800 768MB 192-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Workstation Video Card
Seagate 500GB SATA HD w/ Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit

It's a video editing build for my friends who are starting thier own business. I have made two, and on one of them I am writing this post! It is AWESOME! However, the other machine is having an issue on boot up. Also, this machine is not recognizing one drive. The other machine will not automatically boot. I had issues with it loading windows. This is how it all went down, step by step.
-Tried to install windows, but it always said the CD BOOT failed.
-Moved the SATA ports around, and that helped my DVD drives to be recognized.
-Booted windows, but had to pick out the drive from a list of all the bootable devices.
-loaded windows onto 500GB drive. Left, and powered down.
-started up, then had to pick drive from list of bootable devices again. Why no auto start here? Turn out windows failed to load this time, and it asked me to install DVD again, and run a repair installation.
-Ran repair instal, nothing happened for one hour. Turned off system.
-Re-installed windows, but when I reformatted the 500gb drive using the windows loading utility (the first screen after the key verification), It wouldn't let me use the 500gb drive.
-Installed windows on the 1TB drive. It now works, but...
every time I start windows now, I have to pick the device from a list and it WILL NOT auto-start. It takes about 10 mins longer to boot than it should, and it's really annoying. I can't give this box to my buddy like this. Please help me! Thanks so much!!!!!!

Please see below for photos I took during this process!

Truely,
Sam

[SambizelFoRizzel]

Continued...

















after the last image here, it installs onto the 1TB drive, then when I reboot I have to choose from the boot list you see above. Instead of CDROM I choose the HARD DRIVE option and choose the right HD.
What's up with that?

[parasolution]

I would start from scratch and remove all the hard drives, except for the drive you want the OS to be installed on. Once install is complete, shut it down and install all the other drives. Also, if you're not using onboard RAID, double check the BIOS to see that its disabled.

I've had problems installing an OS, when there's multiple drives installed. Found it easier to start with one drive and populate the others once OS install is complete.

If you want to boot off the TB drive, you can try booting with the OS disc and perform a repair through FIXBOOT or FIXMBR program. See if that helps, but otherwise, start from scratch with only one drive.

[SambizelFoRizzel]

I had a friend w/ a C.S. degree come over. It was a pretty simple fix. We used seatools for windows to test all the drives, found out the one drive was faulty by doing a test and booting without each drive. We removed the bad drive. It was the root of all the problems. We did some minor changes in CMOS and now that we've got everything going correctly, this rig friggen SCREAMS! 1 500gb OS drive, 2 - 1TB drives in RAID 0, 2 - 1TB drives for storage. OMG Becky, this is like, totally kewl!

I'm very sad I can't keep it..wah!

Thanks for the help! I hope this feedback helps someone with the same predicament.

Truely,
Sam