Re: [Hampshire] Mixing SATA and IDE disks

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Davies" <stephen.davies@???>
To: <hampshire@???>
Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2007 12:36 PM
Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Mixing SATA and IDE disks


> This is all together a far too common occurrence. IMHO it all goes down to
> the BIOS producers who don't prove a facility to properly order drives for
> booting.
> Its not all that hard to do.
> My two DELL SC1420's (3 yrs old) have a bios that allows you to order the
> booting of devices. Not just down to HDD/CD/USB/LAN level but it
> differentiates between PATA & SATA devices. It can be done.
>
> Perhaps its time for Award & Phoenix to get off their complacent butts and
> sort the bios out. The functions in the bios do not seem to have changed
> much in the last 10 years.
>
> Stephen D
>

Couldn't agree more. For this very reason, I've never been a fan of dual
booting - e.g. multiple operating systems on the same physical disk located
in different partitions. Apart from anything I've always felt I'd have no
trouble accidentally screwing one partition up. With a BIOS that correctly
handled which physical drive (of a potential handful) you can boot from, it
would be much harder (though still not impossible) to wipe/alter a disk.

For example, my Windows machine has an IDE and SATA. Windows refuses point
blank to let me boot from the faster larger SATA drive unless it's the only
drive present. So I'm forced to either lose capacity or run from the IDE
and leave the SATA for data. Funnily enough, this saved me a few weeks
back when I had a corrupt registry - but that's more a happy accident than
anything else - as is often just the way Windows is IMHO.

Perhaps one day, disks and even partition management will be handled all by
the BIOS.

Cheers
Rob