How to Disable SATA Drives in BIOS???
sohos...@gmail.com
My main PC has a pair of SATA II hard drives that I use for XP -- a
250-GB boot drive and a 500-GB Data drive with multiple partitions. I
also have a PATA IDE drive tray system that lets me swap multiple
drives in and out for testing other OSs, etc.
On one removable PATA drive I have a duplicate XP install that I use
only for games (so the game junk doesn't crud-up my registry, etc). I
had a bunch of multiboot problems until I physically disconnected my
usual SATA drives and reformatted and reinstalled XP on the IDE drive.
Then, each drive had working boot files and the two boot menus didn't
interact, etc. I simply let the BIOS default to the 250 SATA drive and
use the F9 boot drive selector at startup when I want to boot to the
IDE drive.
Problem: I don't want to physically disconnect my SATA drives every
time I install a new version of Linux onto a removable IDE drive. The
damn connectors are hard to get out, and I don't want to stress my MB
or the connector blocks on my drives...but I do want to have the
drives effectively "out of the system" so I can't accidentally
reformat them, wipe out a partition, etc, when I'm installing
something on the PATA/IDE bus
I tried disabling the drives in the bios, but low-level programs such
as Acronis True image and Partition Magic still "see" the drives even
though they're "disabled," and I don't want to accidentally nuke them.
1. Can I simply disconnect the SATA power cables from the drives,
leaving the hard-to-remove SATA signal cables still attached? Could
that damage the drives in any way? Would that effectively disconnect
the drives from low-level routines (I assume it would since there's no
power)?
2. Is there an effective way to "soft disconnect" the drives in the
BIOS, etc?
Your help is greatly appreciated!
--KK in MN
Eric Gisin
<sohos...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1192659437....@v29g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
Arno Wagner
Yes, that works. The data cable are insuklated anyways, via small
coupling capacirotrs. The drive will not get damaged. And without
power it will stay totally unresponsive.
> 2. Is there an effective way to "soft disconnect" the drives in the
> BIOS, etc?
I don't think so.
> Your help is greatly appreciated!
One additional thing you can do is put a switch in, that disconnects
pwer. The clean thing is tio use a three contact one. Disconnecting
3.3V entirely and switching only 12V and 5V should typically work as
well.
Arno
Andy
What motherboard are you using?
Some motherboards allow this; others don't.