My motherboard (Asus P4PE) does not support Sata or Raid. I've bought a Sata II card and three 300 GB Sata II HDD's. My question is can I boot the PC from a Sata II HDD or do I have to have an IDE HDD to boot it? BIOS has the boot options from only CDROM and Primary IDE Master HDD.
the aswer is: i don't know, if your BIOS doesn't know anything about SATA, chances are you won't be able to boot from SATA (at least without a BIOS flash) personally i'd stick with booting from primary master & use the SATA as space (swapfile, document, settings etc. etc.) someone else may know more about SATA & IDE for your mobo EDIT: been thinking, the best solution for you would be to use a third party boot loader (like boot magic, OSS and choose to boot from your SATI drive, it's probably possible to set XP to this configuration but i'm not sure how to install the bootloader to one drive & the rest of the OS to another drive (easy in Win9x)
Thanks for replying, donkey42. I think I'll follow the KISS philosophy and load the OS from and IDE drive and keep HDD's for the rest.
As far as i know, PCI add-on cards do not integrate themselves with your BIOS, so the BIOS will not recognise drives attached to it during the POST sequence. There should be an option in your BIOS along the lines of 'Bootable add-in card' which should enable your system to boot from drives attached to the PCI controller.
You may have the option somewhere in BIOS to allow booting from an add-in card. It may be listed as 'Boot from SCSI/RAID card' but it should apply to your SATA card...assuming the OS is installed on it. If not, it will default to the first drive it comes to with a boot loader. Some newer motherboard BIOSes will see add-in cards, but your board is old enough that it may not. However, you still should be able to boot off the integrated card (again, provided you've got an OS on the drive connected to it).
