New install of Mavericks 10.9.5 will not boot when Sata drives are plugged in

[trotsig]

I have a Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H with 16 GB Ram, booting from SSD. During installation, all Sata drives were unplugged. Post installation the system will not boot at all if any Sata HD are plugged in. It hangs at the frozen blinking cursor on black screen. When I unplug the sata HDs, it will boot OK. Then I have to plug in all of the sata HDs and they mount and can be used. All the Users profiles and files are naturally stored on the sata drives. How do I get the sata HD to pass through the booting process while they are plugged in? Should I do a new install with all of the SATA HD plugged in? That scares me...

BIOS: Flashed back to F8m (I tried both F8 and F8m which I found to be more stable)
Boot options: not UEFI version, set to SSD
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H
Intel Core i5-4690K, 3.5 GHZ
ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti
16 GB Corsair Vengeance Ram
Fractal Design R3 ATX Computer Case
250 GB Samsung 840 SSD
6 assorted SATA2 & SATA3 HD
Apple usb keyboard
Apple Magic Trackpad
Logitech Performance MX Mouse

 

[clipper99]

It's probably just one of the SATA drives that is causing the problem, unless of course you've already tried plugging them in one at a time.

Either way, it's a known Chimera bug...the problem does not happen with Clover Bootloader.

Chimera text-spinner suddenly hangs (at about '|' or '/') with presence of internal time machine drive
I simply added the following to my org.chameleon.boot.plist file and all is well. This method though is only for a single-booting system. If you are dual-booting to Windows this key will cause your Windows boot drive to not appear on the Chimera selection screen. For that you'd have to do a BIOS boot selection.

<key>Scan Single Drive</key>
<string>Yes</string>

Good luck!

 

[trotsig]

It's probably just one of the SATA drives that is causing the problem, unless of course you've already tried plugging them in one at a time.

Either way, it's a known Chimera bug...the problem does not happen with Clover Bootloader.

Chimera text-spinner suddenly hangs (at about '|' or '/') with presence of internal time machine drive
I simply added the following to my org.chameleon.boot.plist file and all is well. This method though is only for a single-booting system. If you are dual-booting to Windows this key will cause your Windows boot drive to not appear on the Chimera selection screen. For that you'd have to do a BIOS boot selection.

<key>Scan Single Drive</key>
<string>Yes</string>

Good luck!

I have no Windows (thank goodness) except for my collection of Virtual Machines, but I noticed there is an EFI partition on the Users SATA HD. I have no idea how it got there, can that be the problem? I have only tried plugging in 1 of the SATA HDs (USERS) since it's a PITA plugging and unplugging all of them. I ran Snow Leopard -> Mountain Lion before and just now did an upgrade to Mavericks ...
Why would the USERS Sata HD have an EFI partition on it ? I never pointed Multibeast at it... I only boot from SDD Drives.
I do have a time machine drive but has not been plugged in at all since installation so I doubt there is any telepathy going on.

 

[clipper99]

The problem can also happen without TimeMachine drives present. I don't know why it happens but adding that key should/will allow you to boot with the drives attached. Like I said, it doesn't happen with Clover bootloader so AFAIC it's a Chimera bug.

 

[trotsig]

Thank you Clipper99, That did work just fine and now I can boot normally!

<key>Scan Single Drive</key>
<string>Yes</string>

Fixed the problem! I am so happy now!