Topic awaiting preservation: Of Serial ATA Drives, and booting from CD's

So here's the deal I'm putting together a new Linux box and by accident I got actually got a serial ATA Drive for it instead of IDE.

No biggie I thought, no big IDE cables? Hey I can deal with that so I bought a Serial ATA PCI adapter (no raid or anything just the PCI Adapter) plugged everything in and tried booting from my Linux CD.

Then I got the NO SYSTEM DISK ERROR.

After much trial and error I found out I had been a dumasss and insted of burning a CD image file from my ISOs I had burned the ISO files to disk. (doh!!)

Anyway I properly burned the images, made sure they boot from CD on my Windoze box and then tried on the Linux box. Same NO SYSTEM DISK ERROR.

Now in the BIOS the CD drive is recognized, and set as the only boot device. And this is where my questions come in. First is should somewhere my Serial ATA drive be recognized in the BIOS?

Second even without a HD being recognized should I be able to boot from the CD drive (which is the only drive found in the BIOS)?

Third should I go out and get an IDE drive (I don't mind doing this just to have my main Linux install on one drive and the rest for storage but I'm trying not to at this point).



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

From the top of my head:
Yes when the cd is the only drive you should be able to boot from it.

The serial ATA drive might need it's own controller (like the two IDE controllers on every mainboard) then it will
not show in the bios.

Here are some things you could check:
-In the bios check the channel number, some biosses only can boot from the first channel.
-Is the cd-drive master or slave? This can be set with jumpers on the back of the drive.
Sometimes SMART enabled mainboards don't allow slaves as boot drive
-Are the cables connected and connecting in the right way (switch with the cables from the "known good Windows" machine
-Is the CD-drive capable of booting? some older drives can not boot.
If the serial ATA drive is not connected and the CD is not able to boot you will get the missing system disk error.

There are two ways to by-pass this:

The old fashioned dos/win98 bootdiskette with cd drivers.

Or remove the disk crom the computer put it in the windows machine and install from there (DO NOT forget to back-up when you choose this route




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Support Justice for Pat Richard

(Edited by Rinswind 2th on 06-02-2005 23:38)

The following information would be helpful - motherboard make/model (and BIOS date/version, if possible), SATA drive m/m, SATA PCI m/m, and general system configuration (drives, cards). Information is the key!

Initial prognosis could be anything from inadequate power supply ("###W Power Supply" is simplified commercial jargon that does not adequately describe output distribution) to an outdated BIOS (or errant BIOS setting) which is assuming PCI-boot preference over the on-board IDE and floppy controllers. I might be missing the obvious though.

I might initially check for a setting under PCI/IDE in the BIOS that reflects the latter possibility. It might be a good idea to see if there is a BIOS upgrade too (though be aware of the risks involved before flashing new BIOS software - better to check with known issues for that system first).

It might be worth trying to move the SATA PCI card to another slot - some problems can arise with the first slot (closest to the centre of the board) as this is usually a bus-master slot (esp. on older boards). Try not to use the last slot, as some manufacturers provide less power to this slot (or these slots on large boards with plenty of ports).

Try toggling OS PnP Awareness and Bus Mastering if these are available in your BIOS setup, and disable/enable options like 'Boot from other devices' (usually a separate BIOS option to the boot order).

With nothing else to go on: is there a hot-key for manually selecting a boot device after the Power-On Selt Test (POST)? For example, after the memory test on my system (at the point where I'd press DEL for BIOS Setup) I can press F8 to manually select a boot device from the menu (e.g. CD) overriding any BIOS boot options.

Have you verified that the CD is bootable without the SATA PCI card installed?

Hope this isn't completely useless.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzz....

(Edited by White Hawk on 06-03-2005 00:51)

Alright so the technical solution was to shake the CD drive

Actually I hadn't intended to use a CD drive in this box so I had one temporarily in there for the install which was sitting on the box at an angle, once straightend it worked like a champ. (Though Fedora stilll didn't recognize my SATA drive but that's another issue)



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

Glad you got it sorted. Should have mentioned the percussive calibration technique - give it a thump. I always miss the obvious.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzz....