The battery on my mobo died, which was a disappointment in itself since I only bought the mobo a year-and-a-half ago. Didn't even consider that could be the problem until I saw a message board while researching boot problems that said ECS mobos (my brand) are known to ship with weak batteries.

Anyway, I can now get to the BIOS but the PC is not recognizing my HD and thus won't boot to Windows. I have a VIA RAID card controlling 2 SATA HDs and don't want to mess around with BIOS settings since I really only know enough about them to be dangerous.

Any advice on how the BIOS should be configured to allow booting from a card-controlled HD? If it helps, my mobo is an ECS 965T-A.

Thanks for any insights.

Is the battery socketed? Just replace it.

If it's soldered, don't ever buy another motherboard with a soldered battery

I did replace it. Before, it would start up but shut off a few seconds later. Now it runs great but during startup, it shows NONE for all the drives and I get a message that says: DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.

Seems like it's not recognizing the drives because they're running through the VIA card (RAID controller)?

Replace the battery if it's in a socket.

Then under bios, go to advanced features, hard disk boot priority, and select bootable add-in cards.

That should do it.

The motherboard manual has all this info, if you don't have it, you can get it by going to ECS's website.

That's what it says now. For whatever reason it's not reading the card. Also, under "First Boot Device" it says "Removeable" - is that correct? I assume that means it'll boot from a floppy if you have one inserted. Second boot option is HD and third is CDROM.

Suppose I unplug one of the drives from the card and plug it into the mobo. If it then boots correctly, would that indicate the RAID controller card is bad?

You could certainly try adding the drives to the built in sata connections to see if they boot. Your bios may also have a "boot other" setting under the advanced options, make sure that is set to enabled.

It's hard to say without access to the board or manual.

Good luck.

Plugged one of the SATA cables into the mobo and it booted normally. So either the RAID card went bad or it's not being recognized for whatever reason.

Could be the port your RAID card is plugged into is fried.

Bump...just in case any BIOS experts missed this yesterday.

I don't know if this is the correct answer but.... does your controller card have it's own built in BIOS?

If it does, you may have to try different settings in the PC BIOS. Trial and error. Have you tried setting the PC BIOS to no HDD controller, etc. or whatever?

It's been a while since I messed around with hardware like this, but I seem to recall if a controller has it's BIOS, you have to disable the motherboards hard disk controller.

I could be wrong.