SATA/PATA Boot Sequence & Disk Numbers?
Davy
will not boot and states that an operating system cannot be found. I need
to amend the BIOS to specify the sequence to search for a bootable drive.
How do I know which is drive 0, 1, etc ??
And also, but not totally connected, in what sequence would the PC allocate
drive letters?
thanks Davy
Jeff Gaines
<Xns9A75ADFB5494Bme...@216.196.109.145> Davy wrote:
>I have two SATA drives and two drives on one PATA channel. The machine
>will not boot and states that an operating system cannot be found. I need
>to amend the BIOS to specify the sequence to search for a bootable drive.
>How do I know which is drive 0, 1, etc ??
In my BIOS it refers to the HDs by make/model, a pain if you have
identical HDs! I can hit Escape on booting and get a menu up so I can
select the boot device - does yours give you that option?
>And also, but not totally connected, in what sequence would the PC allocate
>drive letters?
XP follows the DOS method - all primary partitions first then back to the
extended partitions. I don't know if PATA or SATA gets looked at first,
may depend on the BIOS?
--
Jeff Gaines Damerham Hampshire UK
That's an amazing invention but who would ever want to use one of them?
(President Hayes speaking to Alexander Graham Bell on the invention of the
telephone)
John Jordan
> I have two SATA drives and two drives on one PATA channel. The machine
> will not boot and states that an operating system cannot be found. I need
> to amend the BIOS to specify the sequence to search for a bootable drive.
> How do I know which is drive 0, 1, etc ??
Depends on the BIOS. Sometimes you'll have a list telling you which
drive model is attached to which port, and a list elsewhere allowing you
to pick the boot order by port. With other BIOSes, the boot order list
will give you drive model names directly.
> And also, but not totally connected, in what sequence would the PC allocate
> drive letters?
Depends on the OS. DOS/win9x would allocate them according to the BIOS,
which is probably the same as the boot order. 2k & XP use a rather
unpredictable and unconfigurable ordering mechanism where the only way
to be sure of installing to C: is to remove all the other non-ATAPI
drives. You can switch the other drive letters around later with the
disk management console. Linux, BSD etc. don't use drive letters. I have
no idea what Vista does.
--
John Jordan
GSV Three Minds in a Can
person Jeff Gaines <jgaines...@yahoo.co.uk> said
>On 03/04/2008 in message
><Xns9A75ADFB5494Bme...@216.196.109.145> Davy wrote:
>
>>I have two SATA drives and two drives on one PATA channel. The machine
>>will not boot and states that an operating system cannot be found. I need
>>to amend the BIOS to specify the sequence to search for a bootable drive.
>>How do I know which is drive 0, 1, etc ??
On the PATA channel, look at the connector. Drive 0 is normally (iirc)
the one at the far end of the cable (or the 'master' if you have the
jumpered?). For SATA there is one on each cable and the motherboard docs
will tell you what the numbers are (follow the cables back to the
headers).
You presumably know whether you want to boot from PATA or SATA?
>In my BIOS it refers to the HDs by make/model, a pain if you have
>identical HDs! I can hit Escape on booting and get a menu up so I can
>select the boot device - does yours give you that option?
>
>>And also, but not totally connected, in what sequence would the PC allocate
>>drive letters?
>
>XP follows the DOS method - all primary partitions first then back to
>the extended partitions. I don't know if PATA or SATA gets looked at
>first, may depend on the BIOS?
Actually XP allocates drive letters based on what the registry tells it
to do, once it is installed and running. Before then it is a crapshoot,
however CD drives and USB drives and memory card readers will all get a
drive letter before we get to assigning one to an unformatted system
drive. Which is why so many XP users are running from F:\windows (and
the one drive letter you can't change after installation is the system
drive).
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
11,020 Km walked. 2,118 Km PROWs surveyed. 38.3% complete.
smocke...@gmail.com
(OS)..., I boot from my PATA disk but initially, I had problems
because the board boot from SATA by default. John have reason, depend
on BIOS. I have a Intel 945 Mother Board and my BIOS have an option to
set wich disk is my primary system disk.