Booting from SATA

[dafury]

I just recently purchased a Biostar 200n small form factor PC with Serial ATA. The SATA hard drive I hooked up seems to be working fine, as does most of the other hardware. I say most because I can't get the bios to boot from the serial ata ide drive!

After going through the win2k pro. initial setup (which worked fine with the SATA) it reboots and refuses to load on the SATA. I don't see "SATA" as a boot option in the BIOS, only HDD-0 up through HDD-3.

I have updated the BIOS to its most up to date version, and tried every boot option available, and still can't get it to boot off of the SATA.

Any ideas? How can I get the drive to boot?

 

[EeyoreX]

Does your BIOS have an option for SCSI/RAID or "Boot other device"? If so, enable one and see if it works.

\Dan

 

[dafury]

Yes, it has SCSI as well as "other".

I have tried them to no avail

 

[EeyoreX]

Hmmm... Is this an AMD based motherboard? And does it use the Promise controller chipset? If so you may have to enter the FastTrack Utility and set up a "single-drive" RAID array and set it to bootable. I know this sounds silly, to set up a "single-drive" RAID but I had to do this with my MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR board to allow my hard drives on the SATA channels to be bootable. Maybe give this a shot? I believe it is <Ctrl+F> when prompted during boot to enter this utility.

\Dan

 

[Slammy1]

I had a similar problem. The fix was costly, I removed all drives from my Primary IDE channel and just run them (it) on my IDE RAID channel.

 

[dafury]

No it's nto an AMD chipset. It's running an Nforce2 with a SATA raid controller.

In the RAID controller setup there is no way to specify bootable drive, because I can't even get passed the "F1 to select drive" as F1 doesn't select the drive. In fact, nothing seems to do anything. I believe it's because it knows it's not an array-capable as a single drive, so it doesn't let me set it up that way.

 

[sinthon]

Jumper

 

[StraightPipe]

Originally posted by: sinthon
Jumper

either a jumper, or your software is out of date. when i recently installed a RAID 0 setup on an Adaptec 1200A the software that was prepackaged (on CD) wouldnt work, I had to use my other comp to download the newst versions.

 

[dafury]

There isnt' a jumper to select the boot device, sata or otherwise.

However, this may help:

When I select HDD-1 through HDD-3 as the only boot device (*disable boot from other devices) it outputs "DISK DRIVE ERROR" and tells me to insert a system disk. Makes sense. But when I select SCSI or HDD-0 it doesn't report any disk error after boot, instead sitting stupidly without progressing.

This tells me it's not a software oudated error (and, to be sure, the software is up to date).

Anybody think of a way to test if it's a hard drive problem or a motherboard issue? Other than replacing the SATA drive (not feasible)?

 

[EeyoreX]

No it's nto an AMD chipset. It's running an Nforce2 with a SATA raid controller.

Then it is an AMD based system. I didn't ask if it was an AMD chipset. Sorry if I was confusing. I have an nForce2 board (MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR). In order for me to use the SATA controller for just one drive, I had to create an array with just one drive. This made no sense to me, but that was the only way I could get the drive to boot from the SATA contrller. I also had to set the boot device in the BIOS to SCSI/RAID. After that, things went great and I have no problems with my drives (non-RAID) on the SATA controller.

\Dan

 

[StraightPipe]

Originally posted by: dafury
There isnt' a jumper to select the boot device, sata or otherwise.

i'm suggesting that the jumpers on your drives are not correct and that is why you dont get it as a boot option.

list drives you have and jumper settings. Cable Select is usually best

 

[Snooper]

If I recall, SATA devices do not HAVE jumpers. Only 1 device per channel, so no need to tell it which device is which.

 

[dafury]

That's true, no jumpers.

It's booting now anyhow. Turns out the format didn't work the first few times, the last time I tried it was flawless. Thanks for your help guys.