Move Boot From SATA to IDE?

You can use one time boot option (F12 on initial Dell screen) to boot from IDE when both IDE and SATA drives are connected.

It is annoying to do it every time you boot, but I'm still trying to figure out how to make the change permanent in BIOS without disconnecting/disabling SATA drive. Using dimension 4600 with latest (A09) BIOS.

AnotherUser,

I have a work-around for you.

After another day of being Stonewalled by Dell Support drones in India, I gave up on using the motherboard SATA slots.  However, I was able to get my two SATA drives to run from a Maxtor SATA PCA card.  The system now boots from a small IDE drive and runs a lot faster than it did booting from a large SATA boot drive loaded with data. 

I'm also running a second IDE drive in the Primary Drive 1 slot for a total of four hard drives.  However, my CD/DVD drive in Secondary drive 0 (with no device in Secondary Drive 1) doesn't show up yet.  Oh well, I got a Dell! 

Concerning Advanced Support, I was finally able to reach them by accident.  It turns out that Dell has a caller ID that automatically routes Dimension calls to India if you have previously used that phone for a Dimension issue.  Currently it is not possible for the support drones in India to forward your call back to the USA to Advanced Support.  You just get caught in a loop where more clueless people in India keep answering the phone.

However, if you can call Dell Support from a phone used for an Inspiron issue, your call is more likely to be answered by an American.  Yes, there are still some Americans working for Dell, like you see in the commercials!  It took three tries, but I was able to talk an American into forwarding my call to Advance Support.

It wasn't worth the effort, however.  The guy I talked to was full of interesting theories, but none of them worked.

Rick,

Here's my solution to this problem. It might not work for your particular setup/OS but it is something to consider as it does not require any additional hardware (I don't have a spare SATA card).

Here's what we did. We did install linux on IDE drive by temporarily going into F12 mode every time we need to boot. But then, once you're done with the installation, you can repartition/reformat you SATA drive as necessary and then copy code part of the master boot record (MBR) from IDE drive to your SATA. You do not want to copy full MBR as it contains a partition table unique to a given disk.

So, the steps are:

1. Install linux onto IDE drive, using GRUB as bootloader.

2. Prep SATA drive as necessary (in our case we had to repartition/format it)

3. Backup your MBRs from both drives into files (use dd). The command below is not a full backup, just the code part of MBR.

dd if=/dev/hda of=./boot-noPar.MBR bs=446 count=1

4. Copy the code part of IDE MBR into SATA MBR

dd if=./boot-noPar.MBR of=/dev/hde bs=446 count=1

Two commands above assume /dev/hda - IDE drive, /dev/hde - SATA drive.

5. Reboot

So, GRUB code that "lived" in IDE MBR now is in SATA MBR and it knows where to go to continue loading of the OS. I'm pretty sure that you can do the same from GRUB setup just by telling it where to copy the resulting MBR but it might be a bit more complicated.

If you have a dual boot (Win/linux) I still think it can be done the same way although involves more work with loaders. You have to make sure your loader works with the original setup (when you have to manually select IDE drive to boot by pressing F12) and then can safely copy the MBR.

A word of warning though. Messing up the MBRs is pretty dangerous, so make sure you backup everything you care about before trying. In our case it was a brand new system.

I wonder if this article corresponds to your issue;

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314057


Title: "NTLDR Is Missing" Error Message...
Microsoft document ID: KB314057

Message Edited by F_Kawashima on 04-14-2004 04:03 AM

Message Edited by F_Kawashima on 04-14-2004 04:03 AM

I have this same problem with my 8300 (latest A07 BIOS). It is VERY annoying!

Any solutions to this? I think a BIOS update is needed!