P5K Premium and 3ware 9650SE Boot Order Issue

Like the topic says, I have this setup.

I have my OS and boot partition connected to the ICH9R in my mobo as well as a 3x750GB Raid 5 array in the raid card.

No matter what I do to reorder the boot order of the harddrive array's it consistently has the 3ware array listed as the primary boot, even after saving the intel array to CMOS and booting up normally. Upon reboot, the intel array has been reordered back to being 2nd.

For some reason instead of just taking longer and then going to the intel array after it has checked the 3ware array and found no boot parition, it just hangs on nothingness. If I hit 'F8' and manually choose the Intel array to boot from, everything is fine.

Anyone experienced anything like this before?

have you tried setting it to first with the raid card unplugged then try it agian?

this does sound a bit odd, its nothing i have seen before though.

anychance you can take some ss's of the bios with your boot order?

Okay, so I flashed to 0404, the current BIOS hoping i would solve something. Didn't work, actually couldn't post for a while, but got it back and going now. I think the problem isn't exactly what I was describing in my original post.

After I set the Intel RAID array to the primary boot harddrive and reboot, it doens't recognize the array on the next boot. In the BIOS it goes through all the controllers and when it gets to the ICH9R, it just hangs and doesn't list the hdds. Rebooting once, will recognize it, but I believe that is what is reordering the boot order since it didn't see it before and defaults the only one it found to the primary one.

I say this because, once, after adjusting the boot order, it did recognize the ICH9R and held the boot order just fine. So it seems as though my underlying problem is that about 50% of the time it isn't recognizing my ICH9R array with the 3ware array installed.

At this point it is just a minor inconvenience and I guess I could move my OS array to the 3ware card to possibly avoid this, but I wanted to keep them seperate. Hmm....anyone experience my new issue? Heh.

EDIT: This board does have known issues with it's SATA support. Perhaps that is all this is. I had never experienced it prior to this.

Well, solely to end this topic for others. I was able to diagnose and figure out the problem. It was a firmware issue with the raid card. Flashed to beta engineering release and it fixed everything. May/may not have been tied to Vista.

Fixed it quite some time ago but forgot about this thread.