ASUS A7V600-X won't boot with Promise SATA drives powered up

[lmichael]

(I posted this on the drives and storage forum previously, but I am thinking this might be more of a MB issue actually.)

ASUS A7V600-X with built-in VIA SATA RAID 1 disk pair ("system drives")
Promise FastTrak S150 TX4 with two SATA RAID 1 disk pairs ("data drives)
Promise FastTrak S150 TX4 with no disks attached.
Firewire card (unused)
Adaptec 2940U card (unused)

BIOS versions are:

ASUS ACPI BIOS 1006
Award BIOS 1.0a
VIA BIOS 2.31
Promise BIOS 1.00.0.30

1) The system worked flawlessly with all drives active until recently (this past Th or Fr I think). No problem powering up and down, and booting the system drives with data drives on.

2) System was up and running when suddenly power failed. I suspected a failed power supply.

I was planning to rebuild the system in a larger tower to allow for additional data disks on the second Promise controller.

3) After the power supply failed, I moved ahead a bit earlier as planned (still was waiting for additional disk trays and internal USB card reader) and rebuilt the system in the new case with new power supply. I did not write down in which order the PCI cards were installed originally. (I wish I did).

4) Now the system boots into Win XP Pro, but only if none of the data drives are powered up (key position must be "off" for each disk tray). It will just hang with a blank screen after the MB and VIA and Promise BIOS messages have completed.

The BIOS is set to boot from SCSI/Internal RAID controller.

I thought it might want to have a floppy and/or CDROM connected and tried that by hooking up the old floppy drive, but that didn't seem to help.

I have tried to just have one Promise card installed, tried using as few different slots, changed the BIOS boot order, ...

I even tried powering up one of the drives after Windows boot was complete. First time around it did a Plug-and-Play install and recognized a "new" RAID controller. The drive was then visible with a DOS letter. Second time around, Windows did not do anything at all, and even a scan for hardware changes did not help.

Yesterday I reset the ASUS BIOS by pulling the battery. I had to adjust a few settings again, such as "intergrated controllers first", but it still isn't better.

I can use my computer, but only without the data drives.

Any ideas? I am frustrated enough to bring the computer to the Geek Squad.

Lars

[glc]

Please don't crosspost. If you are not getting any responses, people don't know the answer.