Tech / Special Interest → Computer Hardware Help > Why would my drive not show in the boot devices?

Why would my drive not show in the boot devices?

Asus PEH67M Evo

System crashes regularly (still working that one out) - but a new annoying problem - my boot drive, an Intel 160GB SSD has disappeared from the list of default boot devices. I have to break into BIOS and go select it manually in the Override to boot from it.

It worked just fine until recently - any thoughts on 1)how to fix it, 2)why did this happen?
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"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.... We are far too easily pleased." C.S. Lewis

Is this SSD you're booting from also the "active" boot drive when you experience system crashes? If so, then I think this would be considered a clue. Also, what OS are you running on this SSD?

This is Win7 64. It has been crashing forever - I keep meaning to rebuild, but I hate starting over It's had a CPU change, and new memory. Today's crash was a "clock timer missed by a secondary processor". The drive is still fully recognized by the system, it can boot from it if I select it manually - but I can't set it as a boot device.
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"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.... We are far too easily pleased." C.S. Lewis

Well, first off, can you confirm the brand/model number of that MB. I can't find any reference in the Google. Also, at this point regarding your original question, I would suspect the BIOS and or disk drive. Not much else could cause the problem as I understand what you're describing.

Typo - P8 H67M Evo

It has happened across multiple BIOS releases. Could be the drive - its an early Intel SSD, but I don't think it suffers from the FW problem they had early on....
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"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.... We are far too easily pleased." C.S. Lewis

I'd recommend talking to Asus about the problem. It sounds like some UEFI/BIOS or AHCI option ROM quirk where ATA IDENTIFY isn't getting properly sent to the device (or is but the ATA CDB response isn't acknowledged by the underlying UEFI/BIOS or AHCI option ROM). If the UEFI/BIOS offers an option that adds a boot delay, try setting it to 3 seconds and see if that helps (crappy workaround but it'd suffice).

I should note I strongly doubt the issue is with the SSD, I'm much more inclined to think it's a UEFI/BIOS or AHCI option ROM problem.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer.

Do you have more than one hard drive in the system? I can't speak for that particular board, but some of them have both a boot device order - which lets you pick from HDD, USB, Optical, etc, as well as a second "hard disk order" option, where you have to tell it which hard disk to use when the HDD option is triggered. If your SSD isn't set as the default on that second option menu, the system won't try to boot to it automatically, but it would be an option in the manual boot menu.