Blu-ray SATA boot capability on old motherboard \ VOGONS

Blu-ray SATA boot capability on old motherboard

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First post, by DosFreak

Posted on 2011-12-24, 18:21

DosFreak Offline

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Visiting my parents for Christmas and decided to upgrade my brothers computer.

It had 1 Plextor CDRW and 1 Plextor DVD writer both IDE.

I had recently upgraded my old blu-ray drive in my computer so I brought my old one with me.

Before I left I had suspected that the 2 SATA ports on the motherboard would not allow booting from a CD drive (only supports hard drive) so I bought this from Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16816132013

Rosewill RC-209-EX PCI

I confirmed that booting in fact did not work using the onboard SATA ports when I put the drive in but the blu-ray drive supports booting just fine from the SATA card! yay.

So if anyone else wants to remove those old IDE CD drives from their computer then this is an option.

Motherboard is a Asus A7N8X

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Reply 1 of 2, by GXL750

Posted on 2011-12-24, 20:30

GXL750 Offline

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I've actually never encountered a motherboard with onboard SATA that couldn't use it to boot from optical drive. however, a few circa 2003/2004 era systems I've had setup did require a little extra work in BIOS and were somewhat tricky, initially.

As far as I know, most boards with the 865 and 875P chipsets should be fine. I would expect the most likely to have trouble boards would be cheaper models using chipsets that don't support SATA and thus use an additional chip to gain support.

Reply 2 of 2, by pewpewpew

Posted on 2014-08-31, 16:00

pewpewpew Offline

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Just added information for those who Search.

GXL750 got it right. The A7N8X didn't have native SATA. The A7N8X Deluxe model had SATA RAID added by a Silicon Image 3112A chip.

So IIRC your OS could see SATA drives, but BIOS could not. So you couldn't boot SATA, and POST would complain about missing HDD if you didn't include an IDE.

EDIT: a BIOS update adds a SATA/SCSI boot option for this board.

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