Hi all,

 

I purchased a motherboard bundle of eBay for my server (P5GC-MX/1333 with Pentium Dual CPU E2180) and all works fine, however if i add a hard drive i have to modify the boot order in the bios as it tries to boot from a HDD as opposed the the USB key.

 

This is not a major issue for me but i need to setup a new build for my place of work and would like to avoid this, can anyone give me an idea why this might happen or what i need to look for in a new mobo?

 

Cheers

Lloyd

That's a common problem when you change the configuration.  If the BIOS boot setting isn't persistent, there's not really anything you can do.  What MAY help is to use a different USB flash drive ... some are seen as hard drive (thus must be listed as first in the "hard drive order" settings;  others are seen as USB devices ... so if USB is listed as the first boot option they'll boot directly.    The latter tend to be more persistent;  the former often cause the issue you've seen here.

 

thanks for the reply

I've seen this in ASUS boards, change the drive layout and it resets the boot order.

I've seen this in quite a few boards from various manufacturers.  But I've never seen a BIOS that had issues with it IF it enumerates the flash drive as a USB device instead of a hard drive.

 

Unfortunately, I don't know of any simple way to determine whether a specific flash drive will look like a hard drive or a USB device without simply trying it.    I think it's somewhat related to the size of the unit (large devices are more likely to be treated as hard drives) ... but there's no absolute correlation that I've determined.

 

i really wish i had not installed my usb stick inside the case now  :'(