Force GT 180 Disappears After Plugging in External Drive

Hi,

Yesterday I installed a new Force 3 GT 180GB drive. During the isntallation, I unplugged all other internal and external drives from the computer. I initially set the boot priority to CD drive in order to install Windows 7 (64bit, professional edition).

After Windows installed, I rebooted the system and changed the boot priority to Force GT. I also changed the hard drive settings from IDE to AHCI as recommended. Following this reboot, I installed all of the essential drivers (Chipset, USB, Video, Audio, and Marvell ATA Controller). At this point, I also plugged in my external Western Digital Passport hard drive as some of the drivers were located on that drive. This drive had only been used for storrage.

I rebooted the PC with the WD drive still plugged in. At reboot, a prompt showed up indicating the system is attempting to boot from the CD, but there is no valid CD (I had removed the Windows CD after the installation). I then went back into BIOS and noticed Force GT had disappeared. My boot obtions were from CD or from the WD external drive.

I tried rebooting several times without making any changes, and the same problem occured. I then unplugged the WD drive, and rebooted. Everything worked fine then. Windows loaded without an issue, and Force GT was, of course, recognized in BIOS. I then reinstalled some of the drivers; I enabled TRIM; and I made sure AHCI was enabled in Windows registry. I rebooted the system again without plugging in any external drives. Everything worked fine again.

I then plugged the WD external again into a USB port and rebooted. The same problem described above occured again. I have not tried plugging in any other drives, and I have also not tried switching out the SATA cable.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks,

Goran

Go to the BIOS and Boot menu.

There should be a option to show the boot drive list. Go into that and change the 1st drive to the Force GT. Save changes and it should now boot normally even with a external drive plugged in.