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

[loninappleton]

Maybe I should start a new thread but if Bjs is still on here I might get a lead on fixing my problem with a PCI to SATA add-in card.

The card shows a controller chip on it with a VIA part number as follows:

VT6421A


This was a generic purchase but the card is identical to

a Plus Com card

shown here:


http://www.amazon.co.uk/VT6421A-PORT-SATA-SERIAL-CONTROLL/dp/B000MR7SNS


There is a disk shown with the Pluscom.

But I have my RAID/AHCI driver files saved to a floppy from the Biostar manufacturer.


Are these the same thing? And if not is there a VIA controller driver / flash routine for this generic chip number?

The goal is to simply get more SATA ports off my old board, a Biostar MCP6PB M2+

No drive is recognized at the card. I have just done one of the Biostar BIOS updates and this has not
found the PCI card either.

Any direction on this appreciated.



I

[davexnet]

Are you trying to boot from a drive attached to this card?

If not, I don't think anything special is required. You insert the card, install the driver,
and check the results in the device manager.

[turk690]

When installing a IDE/SATA/RAID type controller card, note that

• it accesses the motherboard BIOS interrupts so that any drive attached to it will be recognized by the system and listed on boot (note the verbose indications when booting up and note if there are messages pertaining to installed controller); this has nothing to do with any OS (like windoze) at this point
• on some mobos only some PCI slots are designed to recognize such controllers plugged into them; further, only some slots will accept cards with attached devices that are bootable; you have to figure out which ones
• some such controller cards do not have boot ROMs, which means you can't boot from a drive attached to it, but should be able to use it otherwise conventionally to attach additional drives
• settings in the mobo BIOS setup regarding IDE/SATA/AHCI can affect whether the installed controller card is recognized, and whether it will behave as expected or BSOD on accessing a drive attached to it in windoze
• some controller cards use chipsets that clash with the existing controllers on the mobo; particular about this are those that use VIA and Promise (gasp!), the card and attached drives are simply not recognized; other controller chipsets are those by JMicron, Silicon Image, and Marvell, which may or may not have their own peculiarities vis-a-vis the mobos they get plugged in

But I have my RAID/AHCI driver files saved to a floppy from the Biostar manufacturer.

That it's a floppy should tell you this is an F6 function designed to pre-install a driver (windoze), so that OS can be installed (in a clean install scenario, to a drive attached to that controller). Once OS installation is done, nothing further is necessary (except probably to update the driver). If OS is already existing on another drive, latest stable drivers should be d/l and installed to access drives attached to this newly-installed controller. That is, unless it is not recognized due to some of the reasons above or other.

[loninappleton]

How can I identify the ROM needed for the driver if not the aforementioned VIA chip on the card?

Is there a source for the driver for the VIA chip in .exe form since I am not able to locate it?

And yes this is a VIA Phoenix BIOS. I have performed one BIOS upgrade (doing it in step sequence) but not the
most recent iteration to see if the card was then recognized. It was not.

I have had no success in getting 2 HDs and the SATA DVD drive all recognized in the cloning program Symantec Ghost. This of course operates outside of an installed OS.

[davexnet]

According to amazon.com, this card comes in two flavors. One with the BIOS chip and one without.

However, if you're not planning to boot from it, it doesn't matter which one you have.

The RAID/AHCi floppy is for installing XP using the F6 mechanism as was stated earlier. If you don't load this driver during the install,
XP wont install properly (it may not have the necessary driver to access the card).

I've read your two posts, and frankly, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish.

[loninappleton]

Ok it may be apples and oranges then.

I'm trying to accomplish is adding a SATA port on a motherboard with only two. That's three: one for a cd -based disk clone program, the source drive and target drive. Nothing more complicated than that. But the card at this point-- the one I have-- is not recognized at the system level. Whether it can be seen in XP or Win 7 which I also have on some disks is not relevant.

It may have to go into the recycle box. But what does a card like this _ever_ work on then? Why would it not have the bios chip?

If there's no way to get it going, best to close the discussion.

[hello_hello]

Some cards have a BIOS which can be updated. Some don't. If it has a BIOS you can probably switch between running the SATA ports in IDE, AHCI or RAID mode. Although chances are your card doesn't support RAID anyway. If the SATA ports are running in IDE mode you shouldn't need additional drivers. You might if they're running in ACHI mode, but either way, you should be able to see the card in Device Manager without installing drivers. Can you?

Have a look in your MB's BIOS for a setting which might do the trick. Maybe enabling booting from a PCI card might help, if the BIOS has that option. Or try a different PCI slot.

[fritzi93]

I had similar trouble getting an add-on PCIe SATA/RAID card to work. Same machine as in my computer details. Dunno if this will help, but here's the scenario:

Okay, you installed it okay and Device Manager says it's working properly. But the connected device shows up with the dreaded yellow. Properties of the device says no drivers loaded.

Reboot and tap f8 repeatedly. When the startup options page comes up, scroll down the page for Driver Certificate Enforcement. Disable that and reboot.

If that's your problem (driver cert enforcement), and you can disable it in the BIOS, that should fix it. Good luck.

[loninappleton]

I have nit- picked the BIOS but only succeeded in turning everything off. I can switch boot order to " add-in card" in first position of the order. That killed everything.

There is one BIOS upgrade remaining in the queue from Biostar. Still, I have scant hope of that
being successful.

I will look for the driver certification fix.

[Nelson37]

Why are you messing with boot order settings when you do not need to boot from a drive attached to the card? Waste of time and effort.

When you say "the card is not recognized", what EXACTLY are you using as evidence? Are all boot tests from the Symanted Ghost CD, and have you EVER tried to use the card with a real operating system, and if so, what happened?

Watch the start-up screens more carefully than you have done your homework so far. Is there ANY message referencing the card, and SPECIFICALLY anything about pressing a function or other key to setup or configure? This indicates a BIOS on the card, though no message does not mean 100% no on-card BIOS, just no way for you to configure it.

If the card needs drivers, AND you intend to boot from a Symantec Ghost disk, it ain't gonna work. Make a Windows Live disk with the appropriate drivers and Ghost, or use a boot hard drive with everything instead of a CD.

[loninappleton]

I have a mini Windows someplace and could install on a cd with the program.

Nope no messages at POST . If I can run a backup program simply from a third HD that is problem solved.
Perhaps I can do this from a DOS Window or simply run the .exe. I'm not trying to be thick about this. But I've done a thing one way so long it's difficult to determine what needs to be changed and what will work.

Win XP does not do the things mentioned above: see the drives etc. It's just a mass of yellow balloon messages and too much to try to fix.

The easiest fix is a new motherboard with enough of everything. I've been putting that off due to the
high rates for cpus these days.

Summing up: the card (drives attached) nothing is seen in the BIOS and no prompts to install
anything is seen. Win 7 shows everything attached-- I had four on at one time. If a third drive can be used to initiate a clone process of two others, that will be what I do from now on.

[Nelson37]

Then boot in Win 7 from a drive with Ghost installed and the separate Source and Target drives connected. You had this solved already and didn't know it. Absolutely a third drive can be used. In fact, it is MANDATORY. CD, windows hard drive, floppy, no difference. ALL are "third drives".

You can also boot from a floppy and eliminate the need for a secondary controller which Ghost might not recognize anyway. No extra controller needed.

When you said the line about another disk with Win 7 or XP not being relevant, you were wrong and simply wasted a lot of time. When you don't know what you're doing, you don't decide what is relevant and what isn't. You give all available information and don't make people play 20 questions to find out what the facts are. That way, somebody who DOES know what they are doing can quickly and efficiently solve the problem without getting mightily annoyed and extremely frustrated, and much less likely to offer any further assistance in the future.

[pandy]

btw - VIA chips are not high class controllers and drivers are poor - You are looking for problems...

Boot should be provided by BIOS extension located on card, if card have no extension then it will no boot unless it is supported by motherboard (and this is very rare - usually for customized solutions).
Set in BIOS boot sequence order SCSI (as most of IDE cards pretend to be SCSI controllers ).

[nic2k4]

I have a mini Windows someplace and could install on a cd with the program.

Nope no messages at POST . If I can run a backup program simply from a third HD that is problem solved.
Perhaps I can do this from a DOS Window or simply run the .exe. I'm not trying to be thick about this. But I've done a thing one way so long it's difficult to determine what needs to be changed and what will work.

Win XP does not do the things mentioned above: see the drives etc. It's just a mass of yellow balloon messages and too much to try to fix.

The easiest fix is a new motherboard with enough of everything. I've been putting that off due to the
high rates for cpus these days.

Summing up: the card (drives attached) nothing is seen in the BIOS and no prompts to install
anything is seen. Win 7 shows everything attached-- I had four on at one time. If a third drive can be used to initiate a clone process of two others, that will be what I do from now on.

You will never see a drive attached to an add-on card listed in the BIOS.

An add-on card that has a configuration utility in the firmware will display a message after POST just before the boot drive is accessed. It usually goes something like "hit F4 or CTRL-S to enter setup..." Sometimes a logo prevents you from seeing anything and if the PC is fast enough the message can be gone before the monitor can display it after switching mode (going from graphic =>text display). There should be an option in the BIOS to turn off the logo.

You can't run a cloning program like Ghost in a DOS window. The DOS version of Ghost has limited functionality nowaday. You would be better off getting something more modern that can at least handle 4k sectors and write to NTFS drives. Acronis True Image is the reference, you can get a limited functionality version free from Western Digital. Other freeware I can think of is Macrium Reflection, Paragon Backup & Recovery and EASEUS Disk Copy. They should all be able to see the drives attached to the card.

The drivers for that card aren't that hard to get. You can get any VIA drivers through their "support portal".

[davexnet]

Never had all this trouble with a Promise Ultra66, 15 years ago!

One interesting thing about Acronis TrueImage, I tried this 4 or 5 years ago, so not sure if it's still relevant.
If you install the trial, you can burn a very basic "CD" version, that you can boot from and do what you need to do.
Never expires, great for this scenario.

[loninappleton]

Today I am on a path to a solution. Windows 7 x64 Ultimate (which is what I am headed toward having as the primary OS on this rig) will recognize a drive attached to the card.

My experience with Acronis has been spotty for this reason: In previous use of the WD version, if I revert to my IDE DVD version of Ghost it produces an error and says something 'has changed' in the format or other error message.

I have had good experience with freeware from HDD Guru. They have a program called Raw Copy tool which runs from a third HD and can install to a cd as well.

Here is a test run at SevenForums of how it works with screen shots:

http://www.sevenforums.com/software/197955-hddguru-hdd-raw-copy-tool-any-users.html

I am running that now and will say if it works adequately as a replacement clone tool.

Also, I am going to try to do the F6 routine for RAID in Windows XP to see if that will activate the
PCI card. BIOS settings are all default for this.

I have previously used other HDD Guru tools for HD preparation and include the link to their site
with recommendation:

http://hddguru.com/

[nic2k4]

My experience with Acronis has been spotty for this reason: In previous use of the WD version, if I revert to my IDE DVD version of Ghost it produces an error and says something 'has changed' in the format or other error message.

I have had good experience with freeware from HDD Guru. They have a program called Raw Copy tool which runs from a third HD and can install to a cd as well.

Ghost would complain like that if you let it "mark" the drives when you first run it; after restoring with Acronis the mark would be missing, but this would have no impact on the cloning. In fact I never understood why Ghost needed to mark the drives and always kept it from doing it and never had any issue afterward. With 4k cluster drives and the need to use NTFS I switched to something more modern, Acronis. I've tried the others, but found that I preferred it over the others mainly because it creates single file archives and I really like the secure zone feature that lets me start the program by hitting F11 when I boot the PC.

I've played with some of HDDGuru's programs before and sure HDD raw copy is a powerful tool, but I really don't feel like waiting for hours for a backup to finish, besides all cloning programs have the ability to make sector by sector clones, but few people use it as it's not very efficient.

[loninappleton]

For those still following this I will defend HDD Guru and its tools. I have brought HDs back from the recycle pile using their low level formatting tool.

And yes, a backup with Raw Copy Tool is slow (still going since I wrote last-- about 4 hours for 320 Gb.) It is more than a clone tool though. It is for HD recovery. HDD Guru calls itself an HD forensic site and it's forum is geared toward professional data recovery.

Frankly I would like to get off of Norton Ghost and will try to smooth out using Acronis.

I have a fresh guide for doing the F6 routine in Windows XP but that will have to wait until this clone job gets finished.

[bevills1]

A couple of months ago I upgraded my motherboard with a new one that has no IDE or floppy controllers. I got a PCI adapter card with VIA chipset to connect IDE optical drives in a WinXP system. Optical drives connected to it will boot to Seagate Discwizard, Knoppix and other boot disks but will not boot to WinXP install disk. Once booted to SATA hard drive the IDE optical drive reads all disks. I even tried slipstreaming a WinXP CD including the floppy drivers for the card in the slipstreamed CD, but there;s still no boot to resulting WinXP CD. I'd expect similar failure to boot issues for hard drives connected to VIA chipset adapters for Win7 too, although I've not tried that.

Next I got a IDE adapter with Silicone Image chipset, and it gave same results as the VIA chipset card until I slipstreamed a WinXP CD including the floppy drivers for the card in the slipstreamed CD which resulted in a CD that will boot to WinXP install CD as well as other boot CDs. I suspect a hard drive connected to this Silicone Image card will boot also if the OS is installed with that floppy driver for the adapter is slipstreamed into the boot CD or a repair install using that slipstreamed CD is done. FYI vLite can be used to slipstream a Win7 DVD which I have done for a Win7 laptop.

A couple of years ago I switched from Ghost 2003 to Seagate Discwizard (a limited version of Acronis), and it's about twice as fast as Ghost. Discwizard is a free download and works for Win7 too. There's also a workaround at http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=Discwizard&thread.id=264 to use Discwizard with non Seagate drives.

[loninappleton]

Well in all this as a to-go-you-one-better I took my PCI IDE adapter (I have one of those too) and plugged it into the PCI slot and into that of those IDE to SATA cards which designed to plug directly into the motherboard. The reason for this was I had/have a doubt as to how well on board IDE is working anymore.

What gets me is the modern day M$ product is supposed to be plug and play but with things like VIA, so rarely is.

I have looked at slip streaming and have yet to attempt something like that. Seagate Discwizard is an option I have overlooked. But I'm still trying to recover a botched clone job to have something to work with.