how to stop pc defaulting to boot from SATA?

skanky · 14 Apr 2007 at 17:53

i have a sata drive, a scsi drive and a pata drive in my fileserver.

in the bios i've set the scsi to have priority over the sata but when i boot it always goes for the sata and i get the ntldr missing error (well yeah, you're trying to boot from a data drive you dumb machine!).

if i unplug the sata drive, it boots off the scsi as expected. if i goto a boot menu and select the scsi (which is at the top), then it boots fine. as this is to be a fileserver, its not really an option to have to goto the boot menu every time.

how'd i change it so that the sata doesnt always try to take over the boot process?

rpstewart · 14 Apr 2007 at 18:21

That's odd but it may be down to how the SATA controller is connected to the rest of the system. What board is it?

skanky · 14 Apr 2007 at 18:32

its an abit an8 ultra.

the sata drive is connected via onboard sata ports, the scsi drive is hanging off a adaptec 29160n pci card.

skanky · 14 Apr 2007 at 18:50

interesting, unplugged the pata drives (2x hdd, 1x dvdrw), left the scsi/sata plugged in and it booted right off the scsi as i wanted!

skanky · 14 Apr 2007 at 18:57

plugged the pata back in (no other changes) and it works, boots off the scsi and other drives appear as they should.. W.. T.. F..!

damn computers!

IAmATeaf · 16 Apr 2007 at 11:37

It's just the boot order that's changed, by removing the drives you've removed the drives from the boot order and the BIOS most probably has put the SCSI controller drives at the top of the list.