PC won't post with drive on SATA port 1 and 3

i have a P5N-E SLI motherboard that i have used without problems for 2 years with IDE. i recently started using SATA hard drives. i still have a 250GB hard drive and a DVD drive connected to IDE.

i noticed that when i have a drive connected to SATA ports 1 or 3 the PC would not post. it wouldn't even show the BIOS splash screen. if i transfer the drives to ports 2 or 4, everything seems fine. what could be the problem on this?

Sounds like you have two faulty ports.

I use to have this board and the same problem but my one of my USB ports did this when i would plug something into it in windows it would just shut off lol and i would not be able to turn it back on for 5 mins

this motherboard has always stuck on the BIOS splash screen when i try to boot up with an external hard drive connected to the front USB's.

also, i made a mistake on my post. i forgot that i have been using a SATA drive on port 1 for months before the rebuild. the original configuration was an IDE boot drive and an IDE optical drive. i then bought a 1T SATA hard drive and added that with no problem.

when i rebuilt it so i can use it in the office, i'm still using the IDE hard drive and optical drive but added an SSD as a boot drive and another 500GB SATA hard drive.

Just a hunch - Make sure you are in SATA "Enhanced Mode" to enable all SATA ports (and not in "Compatible Mode"). I might be inclined to try re-flashing the BIOS and set everything to defaults before setting everything how you like it, but proceed at your own risk.

I've had a few MoBo's that seem flakey on certain aspects - sometimes you just get a flakey one

Nvidia makes good graphics cards, but it seems like they don't know how to make a proper chipset. i'm kinda glad they don't make chipsets for Intel i series anymore.

this motherboard is just terrible! and practically all the problems i have experienced with this motherboard is related to the 650i chipset.

from the time i first built this system back in 2008, i had to wait all the way to early this year for them to release a proper driver for my SLI 8800GTS 512 to fix the micro stutters and the looping sound lockups.

installing the nForce network controller driver would CONSTANTLY crash any web browsers.

and now that i'm trying to use the motherboard's SATA ports, i find out it doesn't even work as it should.

granted that the 650i is a low end chip, but all of the complaints i listed are just basic stuff that is expected to just work. especially the compatibility with Nvidia graphics cards since they make both the chipset and the GPU!!!

Chipsets = Intel for teh win IMNSHO

On these early boards, IDE and SATA were not very compatible. I had a few Gigabyte boards that refused to post if I had two devices hooked to IDE. Eventually I got rid of the IDE devices and went entirely SATA and things worked a lot better on those boards.