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?
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
On 06/01/13 23:50, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
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.
If you go down this route, there are things to be aware of. Obviously you'll have to get a card that fits in your expansion bus e.g PCI, PCI Express, or even ISA!
If the disks have a very large capacity there's a possibility that the card's BIOS or your system BIOS might not be able to read from it.
There are "Revisions" of SATA. 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
A disk that runs on SATA 2, might not be controllable (or bootable) from a SATA 1 controller. I ran into this problem with my PC, when I updated my disks to larger ones. The new disks were bigger capacity and SATA 2, and my MOBO BIOS could only drive small SATA 1 disks, so I had to get a SATA controller card to drive them.
Also, just to reiterate, make sure the card will supports booting from SATA disks - I think some don't.
HTH Steve
On 07/01/13 14:13:01, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 06/01/13 23:50, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
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.
If you go down this route, there are things to be aware of. Obviously you'll have to get a card that fits in your expansion bus e.g PCI, PCI Express, or even ISA!
If the disks have a very large capacity there's a possibility that the card's BIOS or your system BIOS might not be able to read from it.
There are "Revisions" of SATA. 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
A disk that runs on SATA 2, might not be controllable (or bootable) from a SATA 1 controller. I ran into this problem with my PC, when I updated my disks to larger ones. The new disks were bigger capacity and SATA 2, and my MOBO BIOS could only drive small SATA 1 disks, so I had to get a SATA controller card to drive them.
The disc is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 - 1TB. I don't know what version of SATA that might be. The mainboard manual saya the SATA interface is 3 GB/s and, again, I don't know which version of SATA that might be.
The BIOS does recognise the disc.
On 07/01/13 17:09, Barry Samuels wrote:
The disc is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 - 1TB. I don't know what version of SATA that might be. The mainboard manual saya the SATA interface is 3 GB/s and, again, I don't know which version of SATA that might be. The BIOS does recognise the disc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA says 3 GB/s is SATA 2
As for the disk, I'd guess it's SATA 2 or above. There seem to be various versions of Barracuda 7200 so I can't say for sure.
Actually, thinking about it, SATA versions are supposed to be backwards compatible, but I'd expect you'd be best to get a SATA 2 card (or above).
When I had my problem, I had a new disk with running SATA 2, and a SATA 1 controller on the motherboard that wouldn't talk to it for some reason. There was a utility from the disk drive manufacturer to switch the disk into SATA 1 mode, but without a working SATA 2 controller to talk to the disk, I couldn't run it. I then brought a SATA 2 card, and so didn't need to run the utility any more, because I could access the disks directly via the card.
HTH Steve
When I had a problem, it was a combination of a SATA 2 disk with a bigger capacity than the MOBO Bios could support, and MOBO running SATA 1 with the disk on SATA 2older SATA version. I think you should be OK if you get a Card that supports SATA 2 or above. In theory the SATA standards are backwards compatible.
HTH Steve
On 07/01/13 19:35, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote: [some sensible stuff...]
HTH Steve
[But due to a fit of non-proof reading, a paragraph from an earlier draft was left at the end... So please ignore this bit! ]
When I had a problem, it was a combination of a SATA 2 disk with a bigger capacity than the MOBO Bios could support, and MOBO running SATA 1 with the disk on SATA 2older SATA version. I think you should be OK if you get a Card that supports SATA 2 or above. In theory the SATA standards are backwards compatible.
HTH Steve
On 07/01/13 17:09, Barry Samuels wrote:
he disc is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 - 1TB. I don't know what version of SATA that might be. The mainboard manual saya the SATA interface is 3 GB/s and, again, I don't know which version of SATA that might be.
The BIOS does recognise the disc.
I would have expected a core2 era mainboard to have no problem booting that disk. Given it is a used board have you tried setting the bios back to factory defaults ?
3GB/s would be SATA2
On 08/01/13 18:22:55, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On 07/01/13 17:09, Barry Samuels wrote:
The disc is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 - 1TB. I don't know what version of SATA that might be. The mainboard manual saya the SATA interface is 3 GB/s and, again, I don't know which version of SATA that might be.
The BIOS does recognise the disc.
I would have expected a core2 era mainboard to have no problem booting that disk. Given it is a used board have you tried setting the bios back to factory defaults ?
I have now received a new PSU so I could fire up the board again.
I tried setting the BIOS to defaults - no change. The BIOS was version 8 something and the latest is version 17 something so I updated the BIOS - no change.
I have now rigged the SATA drive as a USB external as both my main computer and the spare computer will both boot from USB. I have discovered that this drive won't boot on my main computer either so I swapped it over to the spare together with a USB DVD drive with Knoppix on, booted into Knoppix, and re-wrote the MBR using LILO.
That drive still won't boot so perhaps it's not the board after all. I can't help feeling that I've done/not done something embarrassingly obvious.
I have now gone into 'stumped' mode.
On 10/01/13 19:34:18, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On 10/01/13 15:07, Barry Samuels wrote:
That drive still won't boot so perhaps it's not the board after all. I can't help feeling that I've done/not done something embarrassingly obvious.
Like forgetting to set the "bootable" flag on the partition ? :D
I wish it were that easy - 'Bootable' flag is set.
On 10/01/13 15:07, Barry Samuels wrote:
I have now received a new PSU so I could fire up the board again. I tried setting the BIOS to defaults - no change. The BIOS was version 8 something and the latest is version 17 something so I updated the BIOS
- no change. I have now rigged the SATA drive as a USB external as
both my main computer and the spare computer will both boot from USB. I have discovered that this drive won't boot on my main computer either so I swapped it over to the spare together with a USB DVD drive with Knoppix on, booted into Knoppix, and re-wrote the MBR using LILO. That drive still won't boot so perhaps it's not the board after all. I can't help feeling that I've done/not done something embarrassingly obvious. I have now gone into 'stumped' mode.
OK, I seem to remember that as well as a MBR, disks have also an Active flag, and a Bootable flag. If either of these flags have become reset, then it won't boot from them. I think you can check and change these flags with fdisk but not sure.
Did Knoppix read the disk was OK? Did you fsck it? If not, perhaps you should, and/or run some other disk tests (system rescue CD or ultimate boot CD)
When you say it "won't boot" - what exactly doesn't it do/does it say? There are different varieties of won't boot - e.g.
Insert system disk - Disk failure, or not connected, or no boot/active flags set
Grub/Lilo menu, then error message - then it's done the first part of the boot and something else is failed/corrupted (e.g. initfamfs)
Good luck Steve
On 11/01/13 12:17:05, steve-alug@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 10/01/13 15:07, Barry Samuels wrote:
I have now received a new PSU so I could fire up the board again. I tried setting the BIOS to defaults - no change. The BIOS was version 8 something and the latest is version 17 something so I updated the BIOS
- no change. I have now rigged the SATA drive as a USB external as
both my main computer and the spare computer will both boot from USB. I have discovered that this drive won't boot on my main computer either so I swapped it over to the spare together with a USB DVD drive with Knoppix on, booted into Knoppix, and re-wrote the MBR using LILO. That drive still won't boot so perhaps it's not the board after all. I can't help feeling that I've done/not done something embarrassingly obvious. I have now gone into 'stumped' mode.
OK, I seem to remember that as well as a MBR, disks have also an Active flag, and a Bootable flag. If either of these flags have become reset, then it won't boot from them. I think you can check and change these flags with fdisk but not sure.
Did Knoppix read the disk was OK? Did you fsck it? If not, perhaps you should, and/or run some other disk tests (system rescue CD or ultimate boot CD)
When you say it "won't boot" - what exactly doesn't it do/does it say? There are different varieties of won't boot - e.g.
Insert system disk - Disk failure, or not connected, or no boot/active flags set
Grub/Lilo menu, then error message - then it's done the first part of the boot and something else is failed/corrupted (e.g. initfamfs)
Good luck Steve
This is the current situation:
I have three 1 TB drives. One is the primary drive in my desktop the other two are backup drives used with rsync so each backup drive should be an identical image of the primary drive.
All drives should boot from hda5 and the boot flag for that partition is set for all drives. The drives are regularly fsck'd.
Contrary to what I said earlier all of those drives will boot in the main desktop but none of them will boot in the spare computer.
The message displayed on the spare computer is something like:
Media failure, check cable No bootable drive
It does seem that the intel board doesn't like these drives for booting. It will read the contents of the drives quite happily when booted with a Knoppix DVD.
It does seem as though the answer might have to be a PCIE/SATA adapter with a boot ROM.
http://www.cclonline.com/product/61964/PEXSATA22I/IDE-SATA-SCSI-Cards/StarTe...
On 06/01/13 23:50:11, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
If not, rather than getting a new MOBO, you could get a new SATA card - but make sure it says it'll support booting Satas disks.
I tried that and the PCIE/SATA card wouldn't boot the disc either, even though it had a boot ROM, so I've returned it for a refund.
The only way I can get it to work is to boot from a small IDE drive and have an option in the LILO boot menu to boot the SATA disc. I have to change the fstab and LILO configurations on the SATA drive to change from sda to whatever the SATA disc is, usually sdb,but it will then boot.
I have seen reports on the Web of instances where that same board would boot from SATA discs using Windows but not when using Linux.
On 6 January 2013 17:33, Barry Samuels <bjsamuels@beenthere-donethat.org.uk mailto:bjsamuels@beenthere-donethat.org.uk> wrote:
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'm sure this is a silly suggestion, but will your "main" PC boot using the PSU from the "spare" PC?
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Barry Samuels -
Mark Rogers -
steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk -
steve-alug＠hst.me.uk
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Wayne Stallwood -
Wayne Stallwood