Booting from sata dvd drive

[ajac09]

Is it possible to boot from a bootable cd on sata now? On my current computer it never lets me with the sata drive I bought a few months but on the IDE Ive had for years it will. I ask this becasue I am building a brand new computer completely sata only and needing to know if I need to keep my ide drive around or can keep it in the old media center computer.

 

[Paperdoc]

The issue is that Windows already has drivers for IDE drives built in, but not for other types of connection systems. For those others it needs drivers installed. At installation time, the trick is that those other drivers do not exist in the installation software. Two solutions exist. Windows Install itself has an early step that pops up a screen prompt requiring you to push a key (typically F6) if you want to install such drivers as part of the system. The hook is that those drivers need to be on a floppy disk - if your system does not have one, you have a problem!

The other convenient option is provided by many motherboard BIOS's these days. For SATA drives, there is an option in the way the drive is used to do PATA Emulation. (Usually the other options at this spot include things like Native SATA, RAID, or AHCI.) Under PATA Emulation, the BIOS takes over low-level control of the SATA device and makes it look to the rest of the world (read, to Windows) like a plain old IDE (aka PATA) device that Windows already understands. Make this choice and the Install process just runs smoothly. I know this is just fine for SATA hard drives, so I presume it also is good for DVD drives on a SATA port.

Oh, check this detail yourself: I think that VISTA actually can deal with SATA devices as supplied, without needing additional drivers installed, but I'm not sure. If that is true, then you should have no trouble at all.

 

[pat]

Modern hardware support boot from SATA cd or dvd. drivers are only necessary if using RAID or AHCI or if the sata controller is not part of the chipset, but rather a third party option (like PCI or PCIe card, or even mounted onboard as external controller (promise, sil,..)).
You shouldn't have any problem with any sata port controlled from chipset if you buy a new motherboard now, as any major chipset now integrate SATA support.

 

[ajac09]

ahhh lol yeah booting from sata works sweet thank god