boot drive on ide controller

[luvvbuzz]

i was just wondering if its is possible to have my master hard drive (the boot drive with windows on it) on my ide controller card rather than on my motherboard? or is that a desireable thing to do?

[au7usa]

Yes but you have to tell your bios that you want to boot from an external card?

My system considers any external controller card to be SCSI, whether its IDE or SCSI.

[luvvbuzz]

yes my controller card calls my slave hdd a scsi drive when in fact it is an ide drive. i think i am going to have to seriously look into this as i cant put optical drives on my ide controller card, wish i could though.

[redwudz]

I had the same problem of my PCI IDE controller card not working with DVD or CD drives. It was a 133 only card. Dumped it and got a Promise TX2 (About $40US). You need a card that will work with IDE 33, 66 devices along with the faster 100, 133 devices (HD's) You can probably use your card to run your boot drive, but you may have problems with the OS getting confused. Easy enough to try it, though. Set the BIOS to boot to the card. No, I don't think it's a desireable thing to do.

[luvvbuzz]

is this the sort of thing you mean? ata66?
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2786084958&category=167

if it says the card is ata66 does that mean that you can run optical drives on it?

[gmatov]

Last time I was at CompUSA, the new Promise 133's now support Optical drives.

Just read the box, and if it says it does, go ahead and buy it.

Cheers,

George

[redwudz]

As gmatov said, look for compatibility with CD, DVD, Zip drives. These all use the slower 33 or 66Mhz bus speeds. You may have to read the fine print, but if it is compatible with CD drives, etc. Go for it. The one you point to on EBay should work, but I don't see the brand mentioned. There are several TX2 cards, mine is a Promise Ultra 133 TX2 IDE controller card. It isn't a RAID or high end card. It has backwards compatibility with slower 33 or 66Mhz drives and also works with 133Mhz IDE HD's.