And that is why for my next few win7 installs, I am doing them from a USB drive, Much faster than optical media.

Yes, that's what I will do if my HDD breaks someday. Another strange thing: I need to power on the PC two times in a row in order to load the OS correctly. If I only boot it up once, it's like "LOL, I'm still sleeping, so I'll load things terribly slowly" -says the HDD.

Ok, you're onto something here, because I saw this in my BIOS and was wondering.

YES, the SATA mode is set to IDE mode in BIOS

Is this not correct??? If not, so much for the saying that BIOS handles everything automatically and no need to tweek. If this is the problem I can't help but wonder WHY in the world the default would be IDE mode.

And btw, when I click on that, it gives four options: Disabled....IDE Mode..AHCI Mode.....RAID mode And the IDE Mode choice is always in RED. Would that be because it's default or because it's a safe mode???

I read the manual that came with this motherboard COVER TO COVER and it said NOTHING about this.

Just for grins I changed it to AHCI mode, and when I did all the SATA ports below came up with two new options to choose. One I understand, the other I don't. It is called SPIN UP DEVICE... Enabled or Disabled. Defaults to Disabled.

Here's what my screen looks like unchanged:

SATA Configuration

SATA Mode...............................IDE Mode
ON Chip eSATA 6Gb/s Controller Mode.........AHCI Mode
ON Chip SATA 6Gb/s Controller Mode..........AHCI Mode

SATA Port 1....................Lists my data drive, drive G

SATA Port 2................... Lists my SSD drive, C drive

SATA Port 3...................Lists one of my optical drives

SATA Port 4..................Lists another Optical drives

mSATA..............................not present.

That's it. That's the screen. And the funny thing is that this mobo supports SIX SATA III inputs. But the BIOS has always just listed four. And I've got all six filled. The four I mentioned above and one from my case to enable a front panel eSATA port and the other for another optical drive. (yes, three optical drives on this....long story)

This is so frustrating.

1 Ide mode is the default setting for convenience and compatibility with systems that do not support AHCI mode. However, AHCI mode can be more efficient when using the SSD you can read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/da-DK/w7itprohardware/thread/2c7cbc60-5878-4ff1-b013-cf482b499c05

2 As for the SPIN UP DEVICE do not have that in my motherboard but you can read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin-up

Unfortunately, I can not help you more because I do not even know the model of your motherboard and did not read the manual for your board :(

PS:
why do you need as many as three drives ?

And remember that if you are not sure of any better options in the BIOS did not change their