VOGONS

Adding a PCI SATA controller and booting from it?

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First post, by britain4

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Hi guys, been a little while since I’ve posted 😀

HDD is failing in my Voodoo2 machine so I was looking at the cheap PCI SATA controllers on eBay.

Can you boot from these? Don’t really want to be messing about with drivers in DOS either - how would you go about setting one up?

I’d rather use one than an IDE-SATA adapter for the speed but not if it’s too much messing around

Cheers!

- 486DX2-66, SoundBlaster 16, Crystal VLB graphics
- P-MMX 200MHZ, PCChips M598LMR, Voodoo 1, AD1816
- PIII 933MHz, MSI MS6119, Voodoo3 3000, SB Live!
- PIII 1400MHz, ECS P6IPAT, Voodoo5 5500, SB Audigy

Reply 1 of 3, by cyclone3d

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1. The computer will see it as a SCSI controller - no problem.. just set your BIOS to boot from SCSI after you install the card.
2. You will want a card that has the Promise S150 chipset (NOT Sata II 150). It is the most reliable and compatible and also has drivers for Win9x.
3. Even if only using a single drive, you will need to go into the card's BIOS and set up an array and initialize it.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 2 of 3, by britain4

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Thanks! That’s really helpful, for some reason I can’t seem to find any information at all on these, don’t know if I’m searching for the wrong things or not.

Tried to find a spare IDE drive to put in there for now, which highlighted how much I could do with sorting out a SATA solution when I have time... out of a pile of 20+ drives I’ve had hanging around, from a job lot, I found 1 that wasn’t dying according to SMART or throwing up bad clusters. I’d hoped that they’d been removed from machines due to upgrades, or when the machine was scrapped, but no, looks like they might have all just been faulty 🙁

- 486DX2-66, SoundBlaster 16, Crystal VLB graphics
- P-MMX 200MHZ, PCChips M598LMR, Voodoo 1, AD1816
- PIII 933MHz, MSI MS6119, Voodoo3 3000, SB Live!
- PIII 1400MHz, ECS P6IPAT, Voodoo5 5500, SB Audigy

Reply 3 of 3, by 386SX

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The only problem I always found with PCI SATA cards is that I never got to boot from a dvd drive connected to it, only hard disk. I don't know if it's a bios problem or whatever.
Actually I'm using the Fastrack 2300 PCI but with Linux.

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