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New Motherboards Disallowing IDE Booting?
wattsup asks: "It seems that bootable IDE ports are disappearing on newer motherboards. I recently purchased an
MSI G965M-FI motherboard for a system upgrade. Overall the board is pretty good with lots of features, but it had one unexpected 'feature' that I didn't know about when I bought it. The PATA100 IDE port won't allow you to install an operating system from an attached CD-ROM. Does anybody know if this is an issue that can be fixed by
upgrading the BIOS, or is this hard-wired into the IDE controller?"
"While its on their website, MSI doesn't tell you this on the retail packaging, until you break the seal on the static wrap and look at the motherboard. There, with a tiny label placed over the IDE connector, they inform you 'This IDE
does not support OS installation in hard drive'.
This made my out-of-box experience rather maddening, as I had to get a USB based CD-ROM to install a fresh copy of XP. This seems like a pretty lame way to save money, disabling functionality on an IDE port that's included. Some research shows me that other manufacturers are doing the same thing. Why?"
This made my out-of-box experience rather maddening, as I had to get a USB based CD-ROM to install a fresh copy of XP. This seems like a pretty lame way to save money, disabling functionality on an IDE port that's included. Some research shows me that other manufacturers are doing the same thing. Why?"
Many games nowadays block all non-IDE CD-ROMs, as VirtualCDs tend to be all SCSI drives.
Well SATA CDs are SCSI too (IIRC). What happens as games refuse to recognize your perfectly normal SATA DVD drive? And, of course, the game publishers response will be to go F' yourself
I've looked around on newegg a bit and didn't find anything, but are there any ATX boards with a socket AM2 that have NO PATA ports? The only thing I have that uses them is a CD-ROM, which I can quite easily convert/replace with an SATA. I'd really like to find a board that lacks any PATA ports to simplify my cabling. :)
bork bork bork!
Sweet OS indeed, late model Linux. But, whether we are talking about linux, winxp or vista, keep in mind that the OSs do not rely on the BIOS to initialize much hardware. Indeed, they will ignore most of the bios hardware preconfiguration and configure according to published specs. My new laptop, for instance, notifies me that the Pheonix bios contains PCI bios bug #81. Not a problem, since the kernel enumerates PCI devices itself.
This is one of the main things that made linuxbios possible! The amount of nondependant hardware initialization code in the linux kernel. Calling old world bios interrupt based functions can be more than a little tedious after you have jumped to 32 or even 64bit protected mode. Plans to do away with the old style bios have been underway for many years.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I boot from a Compact Flash card that is plugged into the IDE port via a small simple adapter. It's simple because the CF interface *is* an IDE interface, plug extra lines for power. So if the IDE port is not longer a bootable interface, how to boot from CF in the future? Will there be a SATA to CF interface?
BTW, booting from CF is nice. It's fast, and you don't have to worry that the OS won't come up due to some hard drive failure. It also provides a nice place to stick in some read-only filesystem stuff like /usr.
What might actually be really nice would be a motherboard with 8 SATA ports and 1 CF slot. But it still needs to be a bootable CF slot by whatever means they manage to translate it. I suspect the BIOS coder is going to have to find some space to put IDE drivers back in.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars