SATA PCI Cards OS Boot Up Question

Alty · 23 Jul 2006 at 21:44

I am thinking of updating an old P4 rig I have and giving it some SATA functionality and was wondering if you install a SATA PCI card into a system that has no SATA slots, could you have the OS installed on one of the SATA drives or would it have to be on an IDE drive that connects directly to the mobo?

Joe42 · 24 Jul 2006 at 00:19

You should be able to boot from the sata controller, i have done it before but this was on a board with an onboard secondary sata controller and i'm not sure how exactly it works, and how or if the bios of the board and the bios of the controller communicate. I believe that sata drives are emulated as ide drives in some way to appear in the main bios as an ide drive, this seems to happen on modern boards with integrated sata but i'm not sure if the drives would appear in the bios as ide drives or what.
I'll be finding a few of these things out soon as i'm adding sata drives and a controller to a board without native sata support, so if someone else can't clarify how it works i'll probably end up finding out.

Are you sure its worth sata functionality bearing in mind it offers no real speed improvements and it tends to cost slightly more for a sata drive?

Having said that there are performance improvements with native command queuing but i'm not sure if they are significant enough to warrant the cost of a sata controller and the premium for a sata drive.

Shakey_Jake33 · 24 Jul 2006 at 00:22

I did this before on a friends machine, basically had to press F6 at the start of booting Windows CD (when it says 'Press F6 to install RAID device' or something similar) and install the device from floppy disc.

Alty · 24 Jul 2006 at 03:22

All it is is that I have an old P4 system that is perfectly fine but since I have a preferred games rig now I want to turn the old system into a server in my CM Stacker and basically leave it on 24/7 and have SATA caddies down the front so that I can hot-swap new disks in and out at will. Since the old mobo only has IDE capability I could still install the OS on an IDE drive but was just curious if it was possible to boot from a SATA drive on an IDE based mobo.

Joe42 · 24 Jul 2006 at 11:34

I think it must be possible.

I'm doing a similar thing myself but since i have a couple of old small ide drives around i decided to boot from ide, and i'm using some very cheap sata cards off the bay for my sata drives.

Shakey_Jake33 · 24 Jul 2006 at 11:36

Alty said:
All it is is that I have an old P4 system that is perfectly fine but since I have a preferred games rig now I want to turn the old system into a server in my CM Stacker and basically leave it on 24/7 and have SATA caddies down the front so that I can hot-swap new disks in and out at will. Since the old mobo only has IDE capability I could still install the OS on an IDE drive but was just curious if it was possible to boot from a SATA drive on an IDE based mobo.

You can, doing what I said above mate. It just needs to install the specific drivers on the Windows installation bootup (my pressing F6 when it tells you) so it knows to look for the controller.