GA-890FXA-UD5 F6 won't boot CD/DVD

[Galaxy_Stranger]

I just built a new system with the GA-890FXA-UD5 motherboard, BIOS version is apparently F6.

Everything's working fine - especially to my surprise that XP booted when I moved the drive over!  Amazing!

The only issue I'm having is that no matter what I do, I can't get it to boot to a CD or DVD.  I have two SATA optical drives - the BIOS sees them both.  XP can access content from these drives.  One is a DVD burner, the other is a Blue Ray player combo.

When the boot sequence gets to booting from the cd, it waits a bit and continues on to the boot loader on the HDD.

I can't think of anything that I've hooked up wrong.  What should I check?

[absic]

Hi there,

Not come across this problem myself but I am running Windows 7 rather than XP. First thing that springs to mind would be how you have configured the SATA ports and which ones are you using?

On my board I have set the SATA3 ports to AHCI mode for the HDD's and the GSATA2 ports to IDE for the DVD/CD drive(s) and this seems to work OK.

Have you tried hitting F12 during start-up to enter the BOOT menu and then set your DVD/CD as the BOOT Device? This option allows you to choose which device to use but doesn't alter the default settings in BIOS.

Have you set the BOOT Priority in BIOS correctly? You do this under the heading in BIOS of Advanced BIOS Features.If you want to always BOOT from DVD/CD you should set this as your first BOOT Device. Just a thought but if you load your DVD/CD drive with a disk and the Blueray is set as BOOT device but has nothing in the tray, it will try to read the drive but then go to the next device in the BOOT Priority list. If this is the HDD it will automatically go to this and star installing without getting to the second Optical drive.

[Galaxy_Stranger]

Thanks for the reply, absic!

I have both of these drives connected to the GSATA jacks and I have them both set to IDE.

I tried different boot order combinations, including the F12 boot menu to no avail.

It DOES state that it is booting to a cd/dvd drive and sits and thinks for a bit.  But then it just continues on to GRUB.

[Galaxy_Stranger]

OK!  Found out what the problem was!

I popped in an older Fedora 12 live cd to see what would happen - and it booted!

I was using InfraRecorder to burn some Linux discs so I could install on the other partition.  Then I noticed a warning when burning:  "Some drives don't like closing in simulation mode".  So I went back and unchecked "simulation"  and tried the new cd - and it booted!

What threw me for a loop is that I was always looking for the drive LED to light up when trying to boot to it and it never did.

Thanks for the help!

[absic]

Hi, pleased you got it sorted and that it was a burning issue and not down to the hardware that makes it much easier to fix!