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Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 9:31 am Post subject: New to SATA; a few questions

I wasn't sure where to put this. Under MBs' or under Storage if I had a choice so here it is. I'm a little new to SATA devices with this first optical drive.

A Samsung SH-S203 DVD burner for one of two systems. Either a Abit NF7-S V2 (nForce2 chipset w/ two SATA ports and two IDE headers) or a Foxconn N570SM2AA (nForce5 w/ six SATA ports and two IDE headers).

The Abit box has four IDE drives, two HDDs' and two optical. This new burner would replace the existing IDE burner, but I would still have one IDE player.

The Foxconn box (new) has three IDE drives; two HDDs' and a single burner.

Both had the SATA controler disabled in the bios.

Trying the Abit system first since this is my main system (the Foxconn will be hooked yp to a HDTV), I enables the SATA controller in the biuos, then loaded the separate SATA drivers without the optional GUI interface. Drive shows in Windows and I was able to do a burn with it.

My questions are;
1. I wasn't able to boot from that drive even after I changed the order of the drives in the bios. Is there something else that has to be done?
2. Since these appear to be considered SCSI type of drives by the bios and O/S, doesn't that make it an issue durning bootup?
3. The connectors appear to be somewhat fragile as compared to the IDE headers I've been use to for the past 8 years. Has there been problems with these by snaping them to the side when you insert them (at a right angle instead of straight in)?

I haven't tried the Foxconn box yet.

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 12:37 pm Post subject:

I don't about your motherboards but on mine to boot from a SATA optical device first, I have to boot from "Other Onboard Storage Controller" first (or similarly labeled option) since the CD/DVD boot option seems only to apply to optical devices connected via regular parallel IDE. This is possibly because my older model seems to be somewhat less integrated than other newer and saner ones I've come across.

I've never had a SATA connector break on me. In fact I've found that because I have to exert less force to connect and disconnect them you don't have to handle the drives so roughly to yank out those awful ill-fitting old-school four-pin Molex power connectors (about bloody time they phase those things out).

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 1:29 pm Post subject:

I can set the first boot device to the SATA device, but it blows right by that drive.

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 2:27 pm Post subject:

On my new board that I just got, I installed windows to the SATA HD, and I also have a SATA DVD burner. Those were the only two drives in it at the time. Later I hooked up one of the IDE drives out of my old comp to get some files off of it, and it blew by the SATA drives and was trying to boot off the IDE.

Went into the BIOS and under the boot option, there were 2 things. Boot order, and Hard Drives. If I went to boot order the only things available were the IDE drive, and the SATA Burner. And it defaulted the IDE drive to be the first device. Even if I changed the DVD to the first device it still wouldn't boot off it.

The other option, Hard Drives listed the IDE drive as "First Hard Disk" and the SATA drive as Secondary. I swapped the order on them, and it became selectable in the Boot order menu, and everything went back to booting like it was supposed to.

Maybe there's something of this nature in your BIOS?

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 2:35 pm Post subject:

http://www.uabit.com/downloads/downloads.php?file=/downloads/manual/english/nf7_series.zip

See page 3-10 (page 44).

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 3:52 pm Post subject:

That's a different version that what I have even though it is the same version number, but if you look on page 53, that 2nd entry is missing from my copy. It just shows 'Serial ATA Controller', not the sub entry; 'SATA RAID ROM'.

Anyway, that was disabled, since how can you have a single drive RAID array in the first place, let alone a optical one?? Rolling Eyes

I enabled it and the MB booted from that drive.

(Thanks for the link.)