Topic: SATA drive question

[FPF-SCM_TraceyG_XC]

I have a Gigabyte GA-8IG1000 Pro motherboard. The BIOS has the normal boot up option, but no option for specifying which hard drive to boot from.

Thanks for all the responses, from what I can gather then, if the motherboard finds an OS on the IDE drive, it will boot up from that first, otherwise it will look on the SATA drive.

What I might try doing is just copying the contents of the IDE drive to the SATA drive, disconnect the IDE drive and check that it works. Then reconnect and format the IDE drive.

That is interesting that your motherboard does not have a hard drive boot order menu.  Hmmm, I guess that this hard drive boot order menu is not industry wide but maybe dependant on what company wrote the Bios drivers.  I'm glad to know that, in case I ever have to help someone along with this type of thing in the future.

The motherboard will load whatever OS it finds first as it travels down the boot order list.  Be it from a floppy, CD drive, or whatever hard drive you specify Bios to look to first.  Here is the tricky part, I have a front removable hard drive bay in my case connected to IDE Secondary Slave.  If I remove (or swap) the drive that is currently in there.  Then I have to go into Bios and reset the hard drive boot order so Bios will look for the SATA drive that I have Windows loaded on.  At one point I had four hard drives loaded on my system, two IDE and two SATA.  Any time I swapped a drive via the removable drive bay, the Bios would reset itself to the default boot order.  Which is why I have to change the hard drive boot order every time I swap or remove a hard drive.  The default boot order as follows and I pretty sure this is for all motherboards:

IDE Primary-Master
IDE Primary-Slave
IDE Secondary-Master
IDE Secondary-Slave
SATA 1
SATA 2

So the only way I could get away with swapping/removing hard drives without changing the boot order in Bios would be to keep the OS loaded onto the IDE Primary-Master.  Confused yet??!?   

As for copying the contents from the IDE drive to the SATA drive.  It might work but you may have to change or rebuild the Master Boot Record.

Hope this helps.

Matt

Not confused at all, makes perfect sense. I think Western Digital has a HD copy utility somewhere that can transfer the OS from one WD HD to another. Since both my drives are WD, I assume it would update the MBR as well. Will see what happens.

[Javora]

Hopefully, once the IDE drive is formatted and no longer contains an OS, the BIOS will continue looking for one until it reaches the SATA drive.

Or it will be like my system and halts when Bios hits the first hard drive.  That however is just a simple Bios boot order change and in a case like yours, it should be a one time thing.

Not confused at all, makes perfect sense. I think Western Digital has a HD copy utility somewhere that can transfer the OS from one WD HD to another. Since both my drives are WD, I assume it would update the MBR as well. Will see what happens.

Yes all major hard drive manufactures have this type of utility and that should work.  Good luck.