Booting off SATA PCI card

[LIVAN]

I have a MB w/o onboard SATA controller. I would like to add a card and boot off of it. Is this possible.?

I was thinking about Ghostong my boot drive to the Sata disk and then change the BIOS boot option to Scsi. will this work? Is this a sound approach? IF not can someone help me?

 

[mechBgon]

You can boot from a PCI SATA card, yeah. Ghosting from IDE to SATA might be a whole 'nother ball of wax, though. I'd suggest doing a clean install to the SATA drive and then transferring your files and reinstalling your programs.

Also, the "SCSI" item in the BIOS should tell the mobo to look for PCI disk controllers, so that's the right idea there. Good luck

 

[SUOrangeman]

Everything you want to do is possible.

I am currently booting off of a Promise SATA 150TX4 PCI controller card. Prior to that purchase, I booted off of a Promist Ultra 100TX2 PCI controller card. (The joys of 66Mhz PCI )

For the Ghost scenario to work, I suggest the following:

1. Get your system down to one IDE hard drive (i.e., if you have other IDE or SATA *hard drives* remove them from the Windows hardware manager and them physically disconnect them on the next reboot.

2. Add the SATA PCI controller only and install drivers. Reboot for good measure.

3. Remove the lone hard drive from the Windows hardware manager. It should immediately prompt you for a reboot. Shutdown at this reboot and connect the SATA drive. Ghost immediately to the SATA drive.

4. Physically disconnect the IDE drive and boot from the SATA drive. As noted above, you may have to adjust the boot device order in BIOS. Since you've disconnected the original IDE drive, you should easily be able to reconnect it if something goes awry the rest of the way.

5. Upon first log in as Administrator, you should be promtped for a reboot. Let system fully reboot and ensure everything is as you want it.

6. Reattach IDE drives. If you've used an elaborate partitioning scheme, some drive letters may be out of whack. Repartition/reformat those drives to your liking.

7. Once system is fully to your liking, run Ghost one more time to back up your new configuration.

Today alone, I successfully used this message to Ghost between two SATA drives, from IDE to SATA and then SATA back to another IDE. Granted, all of these systems were identical Dells with the ICH?5? controller which runs IDE and SATA from the same chip. I feel confident in recommending this method regardless of the architecture nonetheless.

-SUO

 

[Polishwonder74]

w00t LET'S GO SU!!!

/off-topic



Do you know of a way to get an old system to boot from a PCI card? I'm thinking of trying to circumvent a slow ATA66 with an ATA133 PCI card and faster hard drive. I've got an old Dell GX1 that I'm trying to do it to that doesn't seem to have a SCSI boot option in the bios.

 

[LIVAN]

SU,

Thanks for the help. My concern is with the drive lettering after. Will the Sata drive be C:?

 

[LIVAN]

Also step 3,

If you disconnect your last drive, where do I store the ghost file?

 

[myocardia]

In Windows, your boot drive is always C:, no matter what.

 

[LIVAN]

Not really. I booted into D: for awhile when I had my Raid 0 setup with my ABIT Kt7a raid, not sure why but that was true!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: myocardia
In Windows, your boot drive is always C:, no matter what.

In DOS, yes, generally your statement is correct, but not in NT-based OSes that store "sticky" DOS drive letters. In fact, depending on what you set your boot device order to in BIOS, and in what order an NT-based OS enumerates drives, during the initial install, you can often end up with the HD getting assigned a drive letter *past* the CD-ROM drives. It's happened to me before.

(Things can get even more complex, if you start throwing in extra disk-controller cards, like both a bootable SCSI, and a bootable PCI IDE controller, in addition to the mobo IDE channels. Lotsa fun.)

To the OP - SUOrangeman's procedure looks exactly right to me. Try that.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Sorry, real work got in the way ...

Polishwonder74, by adding a PCI-based disk controller, that PC *might* be smart enough to let you boot off the controller. Do realize, however, that the had drive itself will likely be the limiting factor, not the ATA33/66/100/133 controller.

LIVAN, the intent of my directions is that your SATA drive would ultimately become the C: with which that you are most familiar. And you aren't saving the Ghost file anywhere. You are Ghosting from the source disk directly onto the destination SATA drive.

myocardia and VirtualLarry, there will always be a C: drive with Windows. However, only the files needed for booting Windows *have* to be stored on C:. The \Windows (or \Winnt), \Program Files, \Documents & Settings, and other directories can reside on any other available drive letter.

Now, go have some fun!

-SUO

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: SUOrangeman
myocardia and VirtualLarry, there will always be a C: drive with Windows. However, only the files needed for booting Windows *have* to be stored on C:. The \Windows (or \Winnt), \Program Files, \Documents & Settings, and other directories can reside on any other available drive letter.
-SUO

No offense, but the real-mode bootloader files for a WinNT-based OS must always reside on the HD (if booting from HD), that is BIOS disk number 0x80, but that doesn't imply that inside of Windows, BIOS disk 0x80 gets assigned "C:". That's up to the NT Object Manager's namespace settings, which as I've mentioned, in extreme cases, because of drive enumeration order and DOS drive-letter stickyness, can cause it to not be "C:".

 

[SUOrangeman]

Good stuff, VL.

Now, provide an example of how one achieves this state. Please include partition scheme and order of operating system installation.

I think I've got an easy one, but I don't have the expendible software to try it.

-SUO

 

[LIVAN]

Suo,

So I see, you don't disconnect the lone IDE PHYSICALY but only in windows manager and upon restart, you connect the sata and load the Ghost file from the lone IDE drive. Is that correct?

 

[SUOrangeman]

(Gotta re-read my message to see if I know what I'm talkin' about!)

OK. Ghost has a disk-to-disk imaging feature. So, at no point am I writing a Ghost file (*.gho).

Just before I reboot and run Ghost, I delete the IDE hard drive from the Windows hardware manager so there should be no trace of an IDE hard drive in the registry. Realizing there there is suddenly no hard drive, Windows will immediately ask you to reboot so that it may redetect hardware. Instead of fully rebooting, we'll power down, add the SATA drive, image from the IDE drive onto the SATA drive, and finally disconnect the IDE drive altogether.

Then, I am ready to boot off of the SATA drive. This way, Windows shouldn't get confused because I've only got one drive connected. Once Windows is happy with the new SATA drive, you can then add the old IDE drive and do whatever you want with it.

-SUO

 

[LIVAN]

Can this be done with Acronis True Image.?

 

[SUOrangeman]

As long as you follow the first three steps of my original post ... and Acronis can do disk-to-disk imaging, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

-SUO, never used Acronis

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: SUOrangeman
Good stuff, VL.

Now, provide an example of how one achieves this state. Please include partition scheme and order of operating system installation.

I think I've got an easy one, but I don't have the expendible software to try it.

-SUO

Oh, hey, sorry I forgot and let this thread slip off of my radar. I did mean to reply promptly.
I can't give you an exact sequence right now, because this was probably nearly two years ago, and I've gone through several disk controllers and motherboard since then, but I can tell you at least two concrete things: it involved a bootable PCI SCSI disk-controller, as well as mobo IDE and a Promise Ultra PCI card, and W2K. (Don't recall if I was using W2K gold to install back then, or W2K with slipstreamed SP2. It might have been before SP2 was even released.)

Anyways, the long and the short of it is, W2K setup detected/enumerated the CD-ROMs (don't recall if this was the IDE CD-ROMs on the mobo IDE, or the SCSI ones on the bootable SCSI card), before the IDE HDs on the (3rd-party SCSI) Promise IDE controller. (Or maybe I had the HD on the mobo IDE back then, hmm.) So the text-mode W2K setup detected the first HD partition as something like E: or F:, quite the PITA.

If I had a working spare machine I'd actually be interested in running some tests, as now I'm kind of curious how I did that too, but I promise, it really did happen. I think it had to do with the bootable SCSI card, which was also capable of booting off of the SCSI CD-ROMs. In fact, I might have used that drive to run the bootable W2K install CD, in fact. Hmm.

Aha! The other possibility, is that I used a Win98se boot disk, with CD-ROM drivers, because I was having trouble with booting the CD off of the SCSI card, since the CD-ROM's ID was not SCSI ID 0, and I ran the real-mode W2K setup program off of the CD, which would be running under DOS at first, and DOS would have assigned drive letter to the CD-ROM(s) first, and not to the HD, because the HD didn't have any partitions on it yet. That actually makes some sense, becuase then the text-mode real-mode W2K setup loader would have assigned the primary bootable HD partition it just created to some drive letter higher than the ones already assigned to the CD-ROMs.

In either case, the workaround that I decided on, was to NOT use the W2K text-mode setup to actually create the partition, because it would be assigned the wrong (non-"C:" drive letter), and instead use some alternative tool (System Commander, or Win98se boot disk with FDISK), to create the partition, and then only format it using the W2K text-mode setup.

If you want to see those "sticky" DOS drive-letter to NT volume mappings, download the NT Object Namespace viewer from Sysinternals.com
here.

Edit: Someone over in the Tech Support forum is having this problem right now, as a matter of fact. here

 

[LIVAN]

Ok, to complicate things, I already have a Ultra100 PCI card supporting 2 drives. NOw adding a Sata PCI, how would this work? I mean tehre would technically be 2 SCSI cards?

 

[SUOrangeman]

Install the card before attaching any drives to it. You'll have to boot into Windows at least once to install the drivers for the card. This way, your Windows install at least knows how to handle added drive controllers.

Then, and only then, should you follow my steps outlined above.

I've run an Ultra100TX2 and an SATA150TX4 in my system simultaneously. In fact I transitioned everything from the Ultra to SATA.

-SUO

 

[LIVAN]

SU,

Can you tell me if this will work?

I have an imaging software called Acronis True Image. I like it because of the great Windows interface.

What if I install the card, then install teh sata drive like you said. Make 2 partitions in the say 160gb Sata drive with a 20GB partition intending to be the boot drive.

I image my C: drive

Then I boot into windows and "restore" the just imaged C: into the sata drive., I now goto disk manager or whatever and remove all drives except the Sata,shutdown, physically remove all drive connection except the Sata, reboot into bios, change to scsi boot, will this work?