Possiblility of booting from an ATA Card?

nailz · Post by **nailz** » Tue Dec 23, 2003 11:04 am

Can you use a boot device from a PCI ATA card? How hard is it to do? I've never used ATA cards before and my IDE port on my MLB decided to take a shit on me last night.

Anime2Envy · Post by **Anime2Envy** » Tue Dec 23, 2003 12:25 pm

I am pretty sure you can, its just a matter of finding a card that supports it. Also it may be a good time to look into raid 8)

Hitori · Post by **Hitori** » Tue Dec 23, 2003 12:30 pm

Depending on your motherboard, you can go into the bios and change the boot setup. In there you should be able to find which devices are bootable. 1st device is usually A:, 2nd device is usually a CD-Rom, and 3rd is usually the Hard Drive. Here you would change the main boot device as the ATA device or which ever one of the hard drives it can see as bootable.

For me I take out all the unnecessary boot devices and go straight to my hard drive as the first one.

But I do warn you about changing anything in the bios... It's not recommended to change anything in it unless you are aware about what you are doing in there... It's like messing with someones' brain.. Good with the right tweaks.. Bad with the wrong tweaks.. And if you ever do mess up the bios, read the motherboard manual about how to flash the bios to restore it to manufacturer defaults.

Anime2Envy is also right about Raid..
But you will also run into the same problem if the onboard raid or raid card craps out...

bum · Post by **bum** » Tue Dec 23, 2003 2:24 pm

ok technicaly isnt IDE and ATA the same thing ?

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Tue Dec 23, 2003 4:55 pm

Bum, yes...

When booting off a 3rd party PCI IDE/ATA card you will need the proper drivers installed in WinXP/2K first, or else you will get an"_INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE_" error on bootup.

So if you're switching from the onboard to a pci card, then install the driver first. If you're installing windows using the PCI card make sure you hit F6 during setup to get it to read the PCI card driver or else it won't see the hard drives...