Question Dell Optiplex 780 - change boot order (amongst SATA devices)

[Grobe]

Hi.

I just ran into a somewhat dumb situation here.

I have an old Optiplex 780 and have used all four SATA ports available. I have mainly two HDD inside, one WDC WD3200AVJS-6 located in the bottom tray (this is an 3,5' hdd and the tray does not hold a 2,5' device), then I have a Intel SSDSA2M080G2LE.

The dumb issue here is that for this particular model it seems to not be possible to have a detailed control on boot order for several sata devices. Yes there is a kind of boot order, but that feature is limited to change the order of HDD-CD-USB without being able to specify the order of each particular SATA HDD or SSD that are connected.

If somebody happens to know a method to overcome this issue, I'd like to know.

Luckily, when I install Linux Mint (in this particular case), I'm able to set it up so that the /boot partition are located on the WDC WD3200AVJS-6 drive, while the rest of the OS places on the SSD.

 

[Vic 40]

Might be a question of finding sata port 0 which likely is boot nr1 , where usually ports get a nr, in your case likely 0->3. See if you can find a manual for the motherboard used and locate poort 0. Only thing i can think of if you cannot choose a particular hdd/ssd.

 

[Grobe]

Might be a question of finding sata port 0 which likely is boot nr1 , where usually ports get a nr, in your case likely 0->3. See if you can find a manual for the motherboard used and locate poort 0. Only thing i can think of if you cannot choose a particular hdd/ssd.

That's true. There are even an easier way, I can open the bios menu, and it will list the model names of all sata devices for each port, so I can just point out the device at sata0 by looking at it and reember what the bios menu said. Also, that wasn't the problem. The main problem was that the bottom 3.5' hdd well isn't suitable for a 2.5' device because of how the cabinet is built.

That said, I've already solved (found a workaround) by having the boot partition on another hdd than where the OS are located.