Boot from SATA w/ IDE drives in Mobile Racks

[Bill Eversole]

Hello,

A client of mine has an AOpen AX4SG-UN motherboard. Recently his IDE
boot drive went bad, and he replaced it with a Seagate 250 GB SATA
drive. With the new SATA drive set as his boot drive, the primary IDE
port is disabled in BIOS. There is no BIOS setting to get around this
restriction. I have read the manual forwards and backwards and AOpen
tech support confirms that when the SATA drive is set as boot drive in
BIOS, the primary IDE port on the motherboard is disabled.

My client still wants to use some of his older IDE drives for music and
pictures, so he purchased some Mobile Racks to use for that purpose, but
since his primary IDE port on the motherboard is disabled, he has no way
to get the rack drives to work.

My question is: If he purchases a PCI IDE controller card, can he plug
his rack drives into the controller card, and still boot from the SATA
drive?

TIA

Bill

 

[Squibbly]

Hello,

A client of mine has an AOpen AX4SG-UN motherboard. Recently his IDE boot
drive went bad, and he replaced it with a Seagate 250 GB SATA drive. With
the new SATA drive set as his boot drive, the primary IDE port is disabled
in BIOS. There is no BIOS setting to get around this restriction. I have
read the manual forwards and backwards and AOpen tech support confirms
that when the SATA drive is set as boot drive in BIOS, the primary IDE
port on the motherboard is disabled.

My client still wants to use some of his older IDE drives for music and
pictures, so he purchased some Mobile Racks to use for that purpose, but
since his primary IDE port on the motherboard is disabled, he has no way
to get the rack drives to work.

My question is: If he purchases a PCI IDE controller card, can he plug his
rack drives into the controller card, and still boot from the SATA drive?

TIA

Bill

you said that your friend has a SATA drive in which he boots from, why on
earth did he disable the IDE drive option in his bios anyway i use windows
and ubuntu on a SATA drive perfectly and still able to use my IDE drives for
storage purposes. why does he think he needs an IDE controller card in the
first place it is integrated on the mobo, the controller cards are really
there for if you want extra drives in your computer system

 

[Bill Eversole]

you said that your friend has a SATA drive in which he boots from, why on
earth did he disable the IDE drive option in his bios anyway i use windows
and ubuntu on a SATA drive perfectly and still able to use my IDE drives for
storage purposes. why does he think he needs an IDE controller card in the
first place it is integrated on the mobo, the controller cards are really
there for if you want extra drives in your computer system

Thanks for your reply. It caused me to revisit the BIOS. I had
misinterpreted these words from the manual, "Enhanced Mode: If you are
using the latest operating system (say, Windows XP, Windows.NET Server),
it is highly recommended to select Enhanced Mode. The system would be
able to detect all six devices (traditional IDE x4, Serial ATA x 2)
completely and functions perfectly under this mode. But please be noted
that it is defaulted with using traditional IDE as the first boot device."

Changing the SATA setting from auto to enhanced allowed the system to
recognize up to 4 IDE drives and 2 SATA drives. Another separate BIOS
setting--one I did not see before and not listed in the manual--allows a
person to set the hard drive boot priority. Moving the SATA drive to
the top of the boot priority list allowed the SATA drive to boot first.

Thanks again!!!!

Bill