Boot from SATA PCI Card

[kiepie]

Hi,

My motherboard (old model) (Asus P4V8X) has the ability to boot from SATA in it's BIOS, but there is no SATA connectors on the MB.
I bought a SATA PCI card and hooked up a Bootable SATA Harddrive, but as soon as Windows starts loading it restarts.

1) Is it possible to boot from a SATA PCI card?
2) If it is, why is it restarting the whole time?

 

[TheRift]

1) yes
2) no idea. Could be drivers not being available for the card. Yes, sounds weird, but Windows does things a bit backwards (remember: Network card is not working. Would you like to connect to the internet to download drivers? )

 

[TheRift]

Another point to consider is that if this is XP and it came from another machine it might be loading a driver for which there is no hardware present. Some drivers die like that.

 

[kiepie]

So my best bet would be to format the HDD and load Windows on it from scratch?

In my BIOS, should it be on Non-Raid? I'm not too clued up on that...

 

[TheRift]

Well, some BIOS can be silly. In my old Asus board I need to get an update for it boot off the SATA card. Once the BIOS was updated I actually had to say "SCSI" as the boot interface. Some BIOS will consider a RAID card to just be any add-on drive controller card, in this case your SATA card.

What are the options in the BIOS? What does the manual say?

 

[howardb]

Did you install the SATA card drivers on your operating system before trying to boot the drive from the SATA card? If so, then you need to connect the drive back where it was, boot to your operating system and install the drivers. Once done, you should then be able to connect and boot the drive from the SATA card.

 

[LFX]

im guessing you r running the drive from which the os was installed in a different config on the card?

a very common reason why windows reboots/bluescreens on startup is because of a missing/corrupt HAL (hardware extraction layer).
The HAL in essence is generated when you install windows and is uniquely based on the hardware components in the system that you are doing the installation on.
If this is the case and you want to keep your current install without having to format, then simply install xp again on the same drive in the same partition. This will then exist on the drive as WINDOWS0, from where you can copy hal32.dll and replace the older one from your previous installation. then edit boot.ini to default to your old installation. If it starts up successfully then you can simply delete the new windows0 folder and all the account profiles in the documents & settings folder.