Cannot boot from SATA burner

[Casper1676]

I have an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard (BIOS 1013) which has a Silicon Image 3112 SATA controller (BIOS 4.2.47) and a Plextor PX-755SA DVD burner (Firmware 1.07). I cannot boot to my DVD drive during startup. The controller recognizes the DVD drive during POST and Windows XP SP2 recognizes it as well. I have changed the boot sequence in BIOS to CDROM, RAID with CDROM, SCSI with CDROM, and boot from other device. I have also tried updating the BIOS on the SATA controller but the update utility does not recognize my chip. I have used updflash.exe 3.35 with BIOS r4283.bin and b4283.bin (using a MS-DOS start-up disk and files from Silicon Image website). When I try to flash the controller BIOS I get a message, “Nothing matched, chip not supported.” I have two questions.

1. How do I boot from my DVD drive?
2. How do I flash my SATA controller (if needed)?

Thank you.

[Steve R Jones]

What type of disc do you have in the DVD drive?
Is it bootable on other pc's?

[Casper1676]

I downloaded two ISO images. Both were of openSUSE 10.2; a Live and Full version. I reconnected my old drive (IDE Samsung CD-RW/DVD) to my computer and they both booted fine. I still have not solved my SATA boot issue though.

[Train]

Do you have the BIOS set right?

Set it to SCSI and it might boot up.

Page 4-16 in your manual.
http://dlsvr01.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/...x-e_deluxe.pdf

[Casper1676]

Good to hear from you Train! I tried several different boot sequences. There is one notable change which does not appear in the mobo manual. I guess they added this option during a BIOS update. Just before “First Boot Device” you have an option called “RAID or SCSI Card Boot” with two options “RAID” or “SCSI” (surprisingly enough). I have tried the following boot sequences (second and third boot devices were disabled).

For RAID: SCSI, CDROM, USB-CDROM, DISABLED
For SCSI Card: SCSI, CDROM, USB-CDROM, DISABLED

Am I the only person in the world trying to boot from a SATA DVD drive on a nforce2 chipset?

[Train]

No, you are not. But the bad thing is mobo is old enough not to have the SATA in the mobo bios. I doubt you want anything to do with Raid and SCSI will not pick up the cdrom.

To me , and I hate to say this, it looks like you will be stuck with a IDE cdrom type device.

Remember windows sees SATA as a SCSI devise.

[SuperSparks]

That's what I'm thinking too I think that chipset is just a little bit too old to allow booting from a SATA optical drive, which are a rarity even now.