Fails to boot

[ronnielee09]

My computer will lock up at will. When I re-boot I get the message that no ndlr is found. The BIOS does not recognize the hard drive. When I plug the SATA cable into another socket, the BIOS will recognize the HD. I then have to click F8 to reset the boot order. Is this a bad motherboard, Hard Drive, or something in the OS? I have Win 7 Home Premium, Asus M3At8 motherboard, Radeon HD3200 video card, 4GB of Ram. I have changed SATA cables and it did not help. Thanks for any tips you can give me. This is about to drive me nuts!

 

[diehrd]

did you install the O/S with a a main drive and a secondary drive ?

 

[ronnielee09]

Yes, I upgraded from Win XP. I have disconnected the second internal SATA drive, but still have my external USB drive hooked up. Disconnecting the internal drive did not help. I do have my primary HD partitioned in a dual boot with XP. I really don't need XP. I could delete this partition if you think it would help.

 

[diehrd]

I asked only because sometimes windows will place needed boot files on the secondary drive which causes a mess for boot issues , I have always installed a fresh install in any rig with a single drive at first and then added secondary drives after the install.