Apparantly, I'm retarded......

posted on July 22nd, 2011, 8:12 pm

Ok, so I've been building, modding, and playing with computers for 16 years now.  I have dabbled in virtually all sorts of tech repair, from t.v.'s and sound systems, to microwaves and appliances.  I'd like to think I'm fairly knowledgeable.  But something occurred this morning that has me puzzled and I can't find the answer anywhere. 

I was monkeying around with adding some new and old hdd's after making some room in my case and on my mobo (Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P).  I connected 4 hdd's to the "sata0, sata1, sata2, and sata3" ports.  I connected my 2 dvdrw drives to sata4 and sata5.  Now, for some reason, in the bios, the hdd's show up on different channels than what they should be.  For example, the hdd on sata0 shows up as the master drive on channel 3.  Then, when I went to install Win7 and Ubuntu, The disk that showed up as disk0 was the hdd hooked into sata03. 

I usually never run more than one or two hdd's at a time, and I have never run into this before.  Everything works fine, but I want to understand the relationship between what my motherboard/manual says, versus what my bios is telling me, versus what my OS's are telling me.  From everything I've known and experienced in the past something hooked into channel 0 should should up as disk 0, channel 1 - disk 1, etc.

Sorry for this long-winded explanation, but I want to understand this.

posted on July 22nd, 2011, 8:16 pm

i thought sata drives dont have master/slave jumpers

posted on July 22nd, 2011, 9:52 pm

This should explain your problem a bit. 

The disk drive numbers may not correspond as expected to the SATA channel numbers when you set up Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Windows 7 on a computer that has multiple SATA or RAID disks

I'm not sure how throwing in Ubuntu will confuse the system.....but most systems let you set your primary boot device in BIOS.  From there, it's just a matter of identifying the remaining drives in your primary boot OS:

Can I reassign my drive letters?

posted on July 22nd, 2011, 10:59 pm

i thought sata drives dont have master/slave jumpers

Technically speaking, some do....its usually for forcing sata2 drives to operate at sata1 levels.  Also, sometimes for manufacturer use.  But not like pata drives for assigning master/slave.

Thanks Nero for that.  I already knew that part but I have never run into this before with any OS.  I think I just have a quirky mobo.

posted on July 23rd, 2011, 2:19 am

I'd start by hooking drives in one at a time. Either the SATA ports are mislabeled, they're wired wrong, or there's some weird BIOS thing gong on. Are all the drives clean? It shouldn't matter, but who knows.

For installing I'd also only have one HDD hooked up; that way there's no doubt what you're installing to.