Booting from PCI IDE

[AuroEdge]

Do you guys know how to determine if my motherboard supports booting from IDE on a PCI expansion card? There's nothing in the manual about it. This is for a BCM GT133KT board.

Something else I noticed is that when I choose to view POST it says something about no 80 conductor cable detected. Do you guys know if I should need this? The mobo only supports up to 66 MB/s UDMA so it would only be for the pci expanision card I'll get.

[minidv2dvd]

that's a maybe. it supports boot from other system device. whether or not your pci card is seen as a system device is unknown. you'd have to enable it in the bios and turn off all normal first boot devices to try it. the hard part would probably be getting windows to install onto it in the first place.

80 pin cables can be used for any ide device. the extra 40 wires are all grounds.

[budz]

You may run into issues since your mobo has the VIA chipset which causes more headaches than anything else. You'll have to have that hd that's connected to the PCI controller card to boot first.

[Nelson37]

Usually for the card to boot, it will have it's own BIOS and the manual or ad will say so. Still can be problematic with some mobo's.

Use the 80-pin cables everywhere, they're cheap and may give a speed boost, also the 40-pin cables are getting pretty old.

[bevills1]

I installed a SATA PCI adapter in an IDE system, and I had to first install updated BIOS for the adapter before the adapter was recognized. The PC would neither recognize nor boot to drives connected to the adapter until after updated BIOS was installed, and it wouldn't surprise me if your IDE adapter needs same procedure before being recognized.

Note some SATA PCI adapters have flashable BIOS while others don't, and SATA PCI adapters without flashable BIOS are not bootable at least on systems I've tried. This may also be true of IDE PCI adapters which could be a problem if the adapter has no flashable BIOS.

[AuroEdge]

I have updated the BIOS to a custom BIOS that is essentially the same over except many of the options are unlocked. My investigations haven't discovered any literature or anything to suggest that the system supports or doesn't support this. I assume that there would be an option in the boot options of the BIOS to boot from PCI device. To that end however, aren't integrated IDE ports related to the PCI bus in some way?

The 'best' information I could find: Bootable from CD-ROM, SCSI, IDE, FDD, ZIP, and LS-120 | Two PCI Busmaster IDE Connectors: 4 IDE Devices Maximum | Boot Other Device: Load the operating system from other system devices.

I'm not sure what Boot Other device entails but combining everything I've read it seems that it tries to boot from any attached device. In another case, it seems like you could boot from a floppy and it would hand over control to the PCI device? Interesting.

[lordsmurf]

F6 when setting up Windows, add your custom card's info.

[redwudz]

When your PC first starts up, you should see the BIOS page for your add-on card. If you don't, it probably won't work for boot. You may have to add the cards BIOS software via USB or floppy. But, as mentioned, booting from a add on card is problematic and not really recommended if you can avoid it.

[AuroEdge]

F6 when setting up Windows, add your custom card's info.

Seems to me once you install Windows that you would require an HDD connected to the motherboard's IDE slot in order to allow Windows to hand over control to the PCI card? This is assuming that the PC does NOT natively support booting from a PCI device.

[Bjs]

1: Card with bios requires no device drivers to be installed

2: Card without bios requires device drivers to be installed