ATA Drive on SATA board and more...

[camus]

Couple quick questions I thought some of you hardware gurus could help me out with.

1. My motherboard has one IDE header, could I boot from an ATA drive (12GB)? It would be on the same cable as the DVD or is this a bad idea? Currently it boots from a 80GB SATA drive, 30GB partition.

2. Doe all drives have a MBR? I had one of my storage drives crash and before it completely failed I was getting an error that the MBR was toast.

[teknubic]

Originally Posted by camus

1. My motherboard has one IDE header, could I boot from an ATA drive (12GB)? It would be on the same cable as the DVD or is this a bad idea? Currently it boots from a 80GB SATA drive, 30GB partition.

Your 12GB HD will need to be on the end of the ribbon instead of the middle connector. Other than that you won't have any problems with this configuration. You will get a performance hit doing it this way if you're transferring a lot of data from one to the other but I doubt you'll be doing that.

Originally Posted by camus

2. Doe all drives have a MBR? I had one of my storage drives crash and before it completely failed I was getting an error that the MBR was toast.

No. Only drives with an OS installed have an MBR. If the MBR goes missing, you'll get the error "No Operating System Found" after post. To get the MBR back, repair the installation or re-install.
HTH

[jmiddleton]

Your 12Gb drive will be 1999 vintage - 7 or 8 years old and nearing (if not past) the end of its useful life. It will also be A LOT slower than a modern drive. Both considerations are important for a system drive. You should have no problem finding a 160Gb SATA drive for $50.00 in the US. Tiger Direct will sell you a 250Gb drive for $59.95 after rebate. If your system is new enough to support SATA drives, you aren't doing yourself any favors by trying to recycle the old 12Gb clunker!

[camus]

Originally Posted by teknubic

No. Only drives with an OS installed have an MBR. If the MBR goes missing, you'll get the error "No Operating System Found" after post. To get the MBR back, repair the installation or re-install.
HTH

I thought so, I just find it odd that I was getting an error that the MBR was damaged on a disc that never had an OS on it.



On the 12gb thing, I was just looking at ways of peicing together another client with leftover parts. I might try it, I didn't think about the age of the drive, but I have another 30GB ATA that had about 9 months of use. Thanks for the info.