Changing SATA bios mode from native SATA to IDE - file or volume accessissues

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DOS Guy

Say that I have a system with a SATA drive, and it's running XP, and the
drive was formatted as NTFS, and in the BIOS I have my SATA drive being
controlled by the on-board SATA controller.

Hypothetically, if in the bios I changed the configuration such that my
SATA drive was being emulated as an IDE drive, would you expect that the
drive would no longer boot into XP?

Or perhaps it would - but only into safe mode?
 
Say that I have a system with a SATA drive, and it's running XP, and the
drive was formatted as NTFS, and in the BIOS I have my SATA drive being
controlled by the on-board SATA controller.

Hypothetically, if in the bios I changed the configuration such that my
SATA drive was being emulated as an IDE drive, would you expect that the
drive would no longer boot into XP?

Or perhaps it would - but only into safe mode?
Click to expand...

The type of drive is not an issue. as logically they are the same. I
am not sure exactly what you mean by emulate, but the important thing
is that the BIOS detects the drive.

The only problem I would expect is making sure that the BIOS is set up
to boot from the correct physical drive

Michael
 
[email protected] said:
I am not sure exactly what you mean by emulate, but the important
thing is that the BIOS detects the drive.
Click to expand...

Obviously you are not aware that SATA controllers that are built into
motherboards and secondary controller cards require their own 32-bit
driver for windows, and that for compatability reasons most of them have
bios options to appear as generic IDE drives so that Windows (NT-based
windows that is) will have the correct drivers to access them during
installation.

NT-based OS's do not use the bios int13 routines to access the hard
drive.

Win-9x will use the bios routines when it doesn't have the proper
drivers for the controller in question - this is known as
"dos-compatibility-mode drive access, or 16-bit drive access".
 
DOS Guy said:
Say that I have a system with a SATA drive, and it's running XP, and the
drive was formatted as NTFS, and in the BIOS I have my SATA drive being
controlled by the on-board SATA controller.
Click to expand...
Hypothetically, if in the bios I changed the configuration such that my
SATA drive was being emulated as an IDE drive, would you expect that the
drive would no longer boot into XP?
Click to expand...
Or perhaps it would - but only into safe mode?
Click to expand...

It should not make a difference. However once booted XP will think
it is on a different drive and controller now and will do a new
controller detection. You will also lose hotplyg ability if you had
it before, but it is pretty meaningless on the system drive anyways.
It may play a role for potential other drives on that controller.

Arno
 
Arno said:
It should not make a difference.
Click to expand...

I'm thinking that an XP system that was installed with SATA drivers,
with the controller in SATA -mode, will not be able to boot if the
controller is put into IDE-compatibility mode in the bios setup. Reason
being that the system drivers would have incorporated the SATA drivers
(not the IDE drivers) to perform 32-bit drive access, and upon loading
them the system would find no drives attached to the SATA controller or
might not even find the sata controller - because the controller is now
emulating an IDE interface.
 
DOS Guy said:
Arno wrote:
Click to expand...
I'm thinking that an XP system that was installed with SATA drivers,
with the controller in SATA -mode, will not be able to boot if the
controller is put into IDE-compatibility mode in the bios setup.
Click to expand...

XP always has on-board IDE drivers and the BIOS is doint the first stage
anyways.
Reason
being that the system drivers would have incorporated the SATA drivers
(not the IDE drivers) to perform 32-bit drive access, and upon loading
them the system would find no drives attached to the SATA controller or
might not even find the sata controller - because the controller is now
emulating an IDE interface.
Click to expand...

See above. And, BTW, I have done this.

Arno
 
I'm thinking that an XP system that was installed with SATA drivers,
with the controller in SATA -mode, will not be able to boot if the
controller is put into IDE-compatibility mode in the bios setup. Reason
being that the system drivers would have incorporated the SATA drivers
(not the IDE drivers) to perform 32-bit drive access, and upon loading
them the system would find no drives attached to the SATA controller or
might not even find the sata controller - because the controller is now
emulating an IDE interface.
Click to expand...

AFAIK, if an IDE drive is cloned to a SATA drive, then the SATA drive
will be unable to boot unless it is connected in IDE-compatibility
mode. You are going the other way, though.

- Franc Zabkar
 
AFAIK, if an IDE drive is cloned to a SATA drive, then the SATA drive
will be unable to boot unless it is connected in IDE-compatibility
mode. You are going the other way, though.
Click to expand...

Not really. The drive will still boot. However the
OS may not have the drivers and may not be able
to access the drive after kernel load.

If the driver is present, it is not a problem. Some braindead
OS designs (Windows) make it difficult to install the driver
when the hardware is not present though.

Arno
 
Ignore Arnie, he doesn't have a clue.

Why don't you just try it? At worse it fails to boot, and you restore BIOS setting.
If you have a PATA port using IDE driver, then atapi.sys is installed.
 
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