Greetings all! I have Win 7 successfully installed (and activated). I have several ATA and SATA internal drives, one USB AtA drive, and one eSATA SATA drive installed. I have made sure that the external drives (and only the primary internal drive) are listed as Active, but whenever I try to boot up with the eSATA drive plugged in, the system attempts to boot from it. I have checked the BIOS settings and do not see it there (Abit IP-35 PRO). It does not do this with the external USB drive (though that can often be unavailable after a re-boot and I have to manually unplug it and re-plug it in for the system to properly recognize it). I have configured all the drives in Disk Management for the proper order (and letter), but this does not appear to make a difference with the eSATA drive on startup. Also, it does not seem to add itself automatically when hot switched (if I plug it in while Windows is running) - I have to go into Device Manager and detect new devices for it to show up. Thanks for any assistance!
And exactly that is wrong. Active means you want to boot from it. 1 operating system = 1 active partition only (minimum for this partition to boot is system, active, primary in disk management) Only your internal boot partition should be active.
My typo - I meant that only the primary internal drive is Active - all others are Inactive. Sorry about that.
This looks like a driver problem to me. Did you install a driver for eSATA ? (You should have, but I think you didn't.)
I think this is a problem with older BIOS makes and nothing to do with your drives. I don't think you can do anything about this unless a BIOS update fixes it - my old ASUS board annoyed me by switching the boot order when I changed things around and getting it wrong. If you eSata drive has a power switch turn it off - turn on in OS and it should install driver and give drive letter - you can change drive letter allocations for all your drives for consistency.
I was worried it might be something like that - the board is only 2 years old (and a highly rated one) - didn't think it would have problems like this. I know I have the latest BIOS release (I got it from here, after all Yes, I can always activate it manually, but that is a bit of a pain. I'm going to check the BIOS settings again, maybe there's something there I can adjust. I think I might have it set to boot to external items first, since I had to boot to a USB stick the last time to do my BIOS update. Hadn't thought of that, but since it's an issue before it gets into Windows, I kinda feel a bit foolish for not having thought of it first, lol. Many thanks