Changing SATA bios mode from native SATA to IDE - file or volume accessissues

[DOS Guy]

Say that I have a system with a SATA drive, and it's running XP, and the
drive was formatted as NTFS, and in the BIOS I have my SATA drive being
controlled by the on-board SATA controller.

Hypothetically, if in the bios I changed the configuration such that my
SATA drive was being emulated as an IDE drive, would you expect that the
drive would no longer boot into XP?

Or perhaps it would - but only into safe mode?

 

[mscotgrove]

Say that I have a system with a SATA drive, and it's running XP, and the
drive was formatted as NTFS, and in the BIOS I have my SATA drive being
controlled by the on-board SATA controller.

Hypothetically, if in the bios I changed the configuration such that my
SATA drive was being emulated as an IDE drive, would you expect that the
drive would no longer boot into XP?

Or perhaps it would - but only into safe mode?

The type of drive is not an issue. as logically they are the same. I
am not sure exactly what you mean by emulate, but the important thing
is that the BIOS detects the drive.

The only problem I would expect is making sure that the BIOS is set up
to boot from the correct physical drive

Michael

 

[DOS Guy]

I am not sure exactly what you mean by emulate, but the important
thing is that the BIOS detects the drive.

Obviously you are not aware that SATA controllers that are built into
motherboards and secondary controller cards require their own 32-bit
driver for windows, and that for compatability reasons most of them have
bios options to appear as generic IDE drives so that Windows (NT-based
windows that is) will have the correct drivers to access them during
installation.

NT-based OS's do not use the bios int13 routines to access the hard
drive.

Win-9x will use the bios routines when it doesn't have the proper
drivers for the controller in question - this is known as
"dos-compatibility-mode drive access, or 16-bit drive access".

 

[Arno]

Say that I have a system with a SATA drive, and it's running XP, and the
drive was formatted as NTFS, and in the BIOS I have my SATA drive being
controlled by the on-board SATA controller.

Hypothetically, if in the bios I changed the configuration such that my
SATA drive was being emulated as an IDE drive, would you expect that the
drive would no longer boot into XP?

Or perhaps it would - but only into safe mode?

It should not make a difference. However once booted XP will think
it is on a different drive and controller now and will do a new
controller detection. You will also lose hotplyg ability if you had
it before, but it is pretty meaningless on the system drive anyways.
It may play a role for potential other drives on that controller.

Arno

 

[DOS Guy]

It should not make a difference.

I'm thinking that an XP system that was installed with SATA drivers,
with the controller in SATA -mode, will not be able to boot if the
controller is put into IDE-compatibility mode in the bios setup. Reason
being that the system drivers would have incorporated the SATA drivers
(not the IDE drivers) to perform 32-bit drive access, and upon loading
them the system would find no drives attached to the SATA controller or
might not even find the sata controller - because the controller is now
emulating an IDE interface.

 

[Arno]

Arno wrote:

I'm thinking that an XP system that was installed with SATA drivers,
with the controller in SATA -mode, will not be able to boot if the
controller is put into IDE-compatibility mode in the bios setup.

XP always has on-board IDE drivers and the BIOS is doint the first stage
anyways.

Reason
being that the system drivers would have incorporated the SATA drivers
(not the IDE drivers) to perform 32-bit drive access, and upon loading
them the system would find no drives attached to the SATA controller or
might not even find the sata controller - because the controller is now
emulating an IDE interface.

See above. And, BTW, I have done this.

Arno

 

[Franc Zabkar]

I'm thinking that an XP system that was installed with SATA drivers,
with the controller in SATA -mode, will not be able to boot if the
controller is put into IDE-compatibility mode in the bios setup. Reason
being that the system drivers would have incorporated the SATA drivers
(not the IDE drivers) to perform 32-bit drive access, and upon loading
them the system would find no drives attached to the SATA controller or
might not even find the sata controller - because the controller is now
emulating an IDE interface.

AFAIK, if an IDE drive is cloned to a SATA drive, then the SATA drive
will be unable to boot unless it is connected in IDE-compatibility
mode. You are going the other way, though.

- Franc Zabkar

 

[Arno]

AFAIK, if an IDE drive is cloned to a SATA drive, then the SATA drive
will be unable to boot unless it is connected in IDE-compatibility
mode. You are going the other way, though.

Not really. The drive will still boot. However the
OS may not have the drivers and may not be able
to access the drive after kernel load.

If the driver is present, it is not a problem. Some braindead
OS designs (Windows) make it difficult to install the driver
when the hardware is not present though.

Arno

 

[Eric Gisin]

Ignore Arnie, he doesn't have a clue.

Why don't you just try it? At worse it fails to boot, and you restore BIOS setting.
If you have a PATA port using IDE driver, then atapi.sys is installed.