ASRock 990FX Ext 4 MB owners; questions

[videobruce]

Sorry I couldn't come up with a better title, but it would of been too long.

Situation: New build;
ASRock 990FX Ext 4 MB,
Will be running Win7,
Two drives transfered over from nForce 570 MB as is,
New SSD & 1TB HDD, neither formatted,
All drives SATA,
MB is set for AHCI for all ports.

Questions;
1. Can individual SATA ports be disabled?
2. In the UEFI interface (BIOS) under Storage, there is a external eSATA port option to enabler or disable the SATA ESP for each of the six SATA ports. What is that suppose to mean?
3. I enabled the "AMD AHCI BIOS ROM" option, but I see no difference during boot.?
4. Is there the ability to use a conventional old school BIOS?

Now here is the kicker;
When I connect either to ports 7 or 8 which uses a Marvell controller, both have been able to boot into XP by themselves. I though this was impossible unless you radically modify them to do so. But when I switch either over to ports 1-6, the BIOS sees them, but both produce a BSOD as expected (until now on the other controller). How can this happen??

 

[dma0991]

1. Why would you want to do that?
2. eSATA is essentially an internal SATA port. It merely picks the SATA port that you assigned to be the external one.
3. Its just another settings that wouldn't strike you as being different from the get go. Its probably just changing to the AHCI option.
4. Why would you want the old BIOS? Older, non UEFI BIOS has no support for HDDs larger than 2TB.

Possibly just a Windows XP conflict between the Marvell controller and the 990FX controller. The problem shouldn't appear if you have formatted with port 1-6 first.

 

[videobruce]

1. Why would you want to do that?

Many reasons, namely to isolate certain drives during specific operations. Running a sandbox, loading a O/S for starters. Now I will have to disconnect the other drive with a O/S when I want to load the other drive with a different O/S. :thumbsdown:

Why would you want the old BIOS? Older, non UEFI BIOS has no support for HDDs larger than 2TB.

I'm use to it, it worked fine and I have no interest in drives larger than 2TB.

Possibly just a Windows XP conflict between the Marvell controller and the 990FX controller.

But, how is it possible that the drive booted to Windows in the first place?? Everything I have read over the years says otherwise due to all the wrong drivers loaded from the old PC.

 

[dma0991]

Many reasons, namely to isolate certain drives during specific operations. Running a sandbox, loading a O/S for starters. Now I will have to disconnect the other drive with a O/S when I want to load the other drive with a different O/S. :thumbsdown:

The option to disable SATA port depends on individual manufacturer's implementation. But separating OS with physical drives is easy and requires no disabling whatsoever. Assuming that you have two HDDs, A(XP) and B(W7), switching which HDD is first in the boot priority is all it takes to load the OS of each respective HDD.

Total isolation can happen if you encrypt the information of the HDD. An easier hack is to hide the HDD from My Computer itself. What they can't see, they would not access. I assume that they have no knowledge of Disk Management(one way to look for hidden drives), since they're starters.

Back in the day I used to mess with multiple OS, multiple HDD and multiple OS, single bootloader. These days, I use virtual machines to run secondary OSes on my PC. There are certainly limitations to running a virtual machine but its a lot easier to maintain and keeps the guest OS isolated.

 

[videobruce]

But separating OS with physical drives is easy and requires no disabling whatsoever. Assuming that you have two HDDs, A(XP) and B(W7), switching which HDD is first in the boot priority is all it takes to load the OS of each respective HDD.

It's happen to me twice. I reload the OS in drive A, but parts of it get loaded in driv B corrupting it in one way or another. Both drives had the same OS (2k the first time, Win7 the second.

I use virtual machines to run secondary OSes on my PC. There are certainly limitations to running a virtual machine but its a lot easier to maintain and keeps the guest OS isolated.

No idea how to do that.

The reson IO run more than one OS (on a separate drive is just redundancy. If one goes down either for software or hardware reasons I have a instant backup. The other reason which I have used more often is access to the OS files for deletion, modification or replacement due to viruses, corruption or missing files without using a DOS utility from a CD.
The only way I will load a OS is with all other (active) drives (partitions) either disabled or disconnected.
I also only one one OS on a single drive, not multiple ones within one partition which would defeat the above purpose.

Eight plus years ago I designed a switch to sap master & slave jumpers to allow one or the other drive to boot. Only a couple of times it didn't for one reason or another.

 

[dma0991]

The reson IO run more than one OS (on a separate drive is just redundancy. If one goes down either for software or hardware reasons I have a instant backup. The other reason which I have used more often is access to the OS files for deletion, modification or replacement due to viruses, corruption or missing files without using a DOS utility from a CD.

Having the HDD as the sole backup is not much of a redundancy as there are more parts(motherboard, RAM, GPU, PSU) that could go wrong, causing long periods of downtime. My main OS, Windows 7 has never had a reformat for at least 2-3 years. No viruses and no corruption. I have had encountered viruses before but haven't had a virus since Windows 98/ME. Its all about setting precautionary measures; like don't go here, don't click that, etc.

My setup now consists of virtual machines and if my primary OS goes down for whatever reason, I have OSes that does not require installation like Puppy Linux and Slax on standby in a thumbdrive. They're always handy whenever I need to use public PCs.

If you want to setup an isolated OS for novices/kids who mainly browses the web(which also brings unwanted viruses), give virtual machine a try. If there are problems(corruption, viruses), all it takes is a few minutes to replace the virtual disk with a backup. Virtualbox(free) or VMware Player works fine as a start.