Sata boot HD problem

[Eldad]

My backup system consists of another HD to which I clone my C HD once
every week or 2. The backup HD and the regular C HD have a switch in
their +5 and +12 Volt lines to switch either off when not used, and
another switch switching the master/slave jumper to select either as
master, so either can be the boot HD, Both are on the parallel IDE
interface.

Now my problem:
I replaced the backup HD with the larger SATA one, and now when both
are turned on the PC boots from it every time even that the regular C
has it's master jumper switched on, so it should be the one to boot
from.

Is this normal behavior - that a SATA HD is always the boot HD, no
matter that another is jumpered as master?
Anything to do or check so I can select from which HD to boot when
BOTH are turned on, like I did before?

BTW, the SATA HD is a 320G Hitachi DeskStar, and it has one pair of
jumper pins, but I could not find out what is their purpose. Anybody
knows?

Eldad

[Joe Mezzanini]

sounds like a real pain !

just buy this !!!

hot swappable

http://kingwin.com/products/cate/mobile/racks/kf_1000_bk.asp

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[edheitzman]

I don't know what that jumper is (maybe it's not a jumper -- could be
an LED connector or something);
but I'm 99.9% sure it has nothing to do with selecting it as boot
drive.

You should be able to select the boot drive somewhere in the BIOS.
Look for a boot menu on the top menu or more often under something
like "Advanced bios features"

For multiple SATA drives there should be a menu to select which one to
boot from by it's specification. IDE drives may or may not be listed
there too.
if not then in your case a menu to select floppy/cd/ide HD/SATA/...
might be what you're looking for

- Ed

[Rich M]

Ed this is a sata and an ide drive not multiple satas.
It depends on the era and chipset of the motherboard but there was a
time period when satas were just gaining in popularity when most
boards would always boot to the ide regardless of bios intentions to
boot to sata as main drive. Chipsets after the 865 for Intel handled
most of these issues but since you have not told us the hardware it is
difficult to do more than guess. There were some boards where even
making the ide drive slave didn't solve it either.
You are actually describing the opposite though and the only thing I
can think of is the system either has sata as default boot device
rather than "sata as ide", or perhaps a raid setting is messing it up.
Systems will always boot to the lowest number sata drive though, have
you tried plugging the sata into the highest number or any number port
other than the lowest?

[Eldad]

Thank you Joe Ed and Rich,
yes, I think that the 2 "jumper pins" on the back of the Hitachi SATA
HD are probably for a LED indicator although I could not find
information about that on the Hitachi website.

Sorry about the omission, am using a BioStar GeForce 6100-M9 Mobo,
which has 2 SATA connectors.

from all the good comments I understand that the situation with IDE-
SATA selection and booting is quite a mess, so I think I'll just stay
with the setup I have now with 2 IDE HD which can be switched on at
will, and booted from depending on the "boot" switch which shorts the
Master jumper pins of the appropriate HD.

If anyone is interested: All the HD power and boot switching has to be
done with the PC powered OFF!

BTW, SATA HD are known to be "Hot swappable". Does this mean that they
can be unplugged (power+data cables) without powering down the PC and
Windows (XP) will not crash?
Does this include the C HD?
How can one ensure that the HD is not being written to when unplugging
it?

Eldad

[David Moskowitz]

Elad,

Hot swappable, yes... but that assumes some redundancy. So, unless
you're running drive C off of a mirrored set, not not swapable w/o
cycling power, etc.

I DO run hot swappable external eSATA drives all the time, without
problems (though every now and then either a driver update or Windows
patch breaks the ability to handle form inside Windows... ZERO problems
in Linux.

re: assurances that the hard rive isn't being used (read or write) when
you unplug it...

Best to use the facilities of the operating system to do this to make
sure the buffers are flushed (something the disk light won't reveal).
Failing that (and Windows can be iffy in this area), wait several
seconds after the hard disk activity light stops blinking (at least 5,
more if you can) before you pyull the plug.

David

[Eldad]

Thanks David, understood.
I find this group and the tech. exchanges very interesting and
educational.

Eldad