On 06/01/13 17:33, Barry Samuels wrote:
We have a spare computer laying around the place, as you do, which serves as a quick substitute if either of our main computers goes wrong. It's just a case of taking the disc drive out of the faulty computer and putting it in the spare and off we go again.
The mainboard in the spare went wrong a while ago and I managed to get a free replacement from my brother in the form of a discarded mainboard. This mainboard is an Intel DP965LT which has a respectable 2.7 GHz Core2 Duo CPU and 8 GBs of RAM.
The PSU in my main (normal) computer exploded recently quite spectacularly with a flash, bang and a puff of smoke so I thought I would swap the drive into the spare computer while I sorted things out. It was then that I discovered that although the spare board had SATA connections it wouldn't boot a SATA drive. With just the SATA drive connected I got a "No bootable drives" message. It will, however, boot an IDE drive.
I do have a small IDE drive and I was wondering if it were possible to write a Lilo boot sector on that drive in order to start the Linux system on the SATA drive. But with the two drives connected the IDE drive comes up as sda and the SATA drive as sdb and, of course, the system on the SATA drive is configured to use sda.
I don't want to change the configuration on the SATA drive so is there a way round this apart from trying to cadge another mainboard from somewhere?
My first thought is to have a good old look in the BIOS and the SATA BIOS (if it's different from the main BIOS) and see if there's an option to allow you to boot from SATA.
If there isn't, I'd check to see if there's an update to the BIOS which will enable it.
If not, rather than getting a new MOBO, you could get a new SATA card - but make sure it says it'll support bootin Satas disks. You could probably get one for about a tenner, depending on what type of card you need.
HTH Steve