Booting Off IDE w/ SATA HD Present
 

For those tech whizzes, my brother and I just can't figure this one out. :neutral:

I just got a 500GB SATA HD..
Now i just want to boot off my SeaGate 120GB IDE drive.
I go into bios, and look, and oh jolly, my Sata is listed as the 2nd boot. So I go in change, but try to change to my C IDE.... No go, it only lists my CDRom, my Floppy (I don't even have one), and the SATA.

Any way I can boot off the IDE instead of the SATA?

Windows XP does not have SATA drivers. I can't remember the steps I took when I built my box but it involved downloading SATA drivers (from another machine) and putting them on a floppy. I don't know if this helps, and if your running Vista then I wish you good luck. Good luck in doing anything with Vista.

eide

So that I understand your post correctly... both drives show up in the bios but you can only boot to the sata drive and not the ide?

If that is the case..Do both of them have a operating system installed on them? Have you right clicked on my computer and went to manage and looked under disk management to see if it show up at least?

Double check that all drives are listed on first page of bios. If not check your cable connections etc. If it's listed then what lucias said.

The BIOS recognizes it, like I said.
It recognizes all my junk, even my USB external :O

I got Vista for free, and was going to set it up for dual boot (and no, it's completely legit!)
The SATA is completely blank, besides the three partitions.

The first time I booted up, after I connected, it booted fine.. But in My Computer, it didn't recognize it. I downloaded the SeaGate drivers (from the CD), and it recognizes it. So I partition it into 3, 150, 150 and 172 (the rest is for whatever... That's as high it lets me). I restart, it sees the drive, it sees my EIDE/IDE drive, but the BIOS wants to boot from SATA, and not from the IDE.

So in short, no, only the EIDE/IDE HD has the bootable files.

Just for reference, this was my birthday gift I just built on the 4th....
Hence BUILT and not pre-built.

You said your SATA is set to 2nd boot. Why not simply disable the SATA in the boot list altogether? Also, might want to check to see if there is a BIOS update because this sounds like a bug to me...

I usually have my hardrive set to 2nd boot.
I can't!
This new motherboard BIOS is different...
It gives me a list, My SATA, Floppy, CD, Disabled

At first, when I first built this rig, it wouldn't even go into BIOS, because the motherboard's BIOS was from the year 2000 :O

So I took it back to fry's, and they updated it for free :P...

So, it's really the latest there is.
It's 07/31/08 (I'm not sure if it was the 31st).

Before my SATA was connected, the SATA was replaced with my Maxtor.... 250GB.

Well then, how do you feel about installing your OS on the SATA and wiping out the IDE? :smile:

What mobo is it? There should be a place to get BIOS updates via download...

I would.... But, I just got my IDE/EIDE whatever you wanna call it hard drive set to my settings.. Took nearly 2 days :(

ECS Elitegroup G31-TM

Once again if I am reading this right.. If you are doing a dual boot system the OS must be installed on the same drive but in seperate partitions.. I am 99% sure that you cannot do a dual boot from 2 different drives.. but I have been wrong before...

No, no dual boot, I might, but that's not the question for right now..

I'm trying to boot off the IDE instead of the SATA, but there's not option in the BIOS.

There might be a bios menu item to enable IDE (it might be set to disabled esp. if this is a new MB). Your board may have come set to run sata only as default.

But it was booting off IDE fine before...
Hmmm, good idea.
I just called my brother, and he's gonna find out for me as well :D