Originally posted by: Huntress
Originally posted by: Huntress
I have two of these boards, one I am setting up now.
Couple of questions with setup of this board.
1) How do I get this board to recognise only one single SATA harddrive (using IDE drive with RocketRaid converter) as boot device? I only have one harddrive hooked up and would like to obtain the added performance of the SATA controller. I would be using RAID 0, but until the Sil / nForce2 issue is addressed, I would just like to use one drive. I have the SATA controller enabled, and it detects the harddrive. I have the boot sequence as Floppy, CRROM, SCSI or HDD0 (neither of which work). On boot it trys everything (including the network) to boot from except the HDD.
One note: I did install XP Pro from the IDE controller initially because of this.
Diana
Still looking for an answer to question one please
I know it is not exactly an elegant way to do it, but if you were desperate you could always reinstall WinXP on the SATA drive with an IDE drive installed. I haven't tried it, but theoretically the new install should throw use the bootloader on the IDE drive and then handoff to the SATA drive for the rest of the boot. Then all you have to do is remove your original istallation on the IDE drive, and remove the option for that installation from the startup. Again, not the most elegant of solutions, but it is a way to get all of your core OS files to run from the SATA drive (which AFAIK remains stubbornly unbootable in the BIOS).
Of course, unless you are running a WD Raptor you probably won't get much added performance from running SATA on a single drive, so it may not be worth the trouble at this point. The real benefit would be in running the drives in RAID 0 (which is still a bit dangerous with all the corruption issues), but if you have an old hard drive laying around maybe you could use it on your IDE channel to hold the bootloader and backups of important stuff that's you'd miss if the array goes corrupt. Then you could throw your two faster drives up on the SATA controller and get some nice RAID action.
Heck even if you don't have an old drive laying around, you can get some of the smaller drives pretty cheap now. A few weeks ago, OfficeMax was running 40GB WD hard drives for $29 after rebate, so getting another hard drive is not so much an issue as it was (on that note, it really seems like a lot of vendors are clearing out their IDE drives now for super low prices, so maybe a wave of reasonably priced native-SATA drives are about to hit).
I know it probably isn't the answer you were looking for, but it is at least a way to get things up and running until a BIOS comes along that makes the SATA drives bootable by themselves.