[ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

Rob Beard rob at esdelle.co.uk
Fri Mar 18 18:55:21 UTC 2011


On 18/03/11 18:37, Barry Drake wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 17:42 +0000, Rob Beard wrote:
>> You might find it could be an SATA cable.  Chances are you're not going
>> to find a big IDE drive easily now as everything is going down the route
>> of SATA.
>
> First thing I did was try a new SATA cable.  I found a 320 GiB IDE drive
> at Amazon quite cheaply, so I'm getting that.  I'm very reluctant to
> re-flash the BIOS as a) it may not work (the updates give reasons and
> none of them are SATA-related).  And b), if it goes wrong, there's no
> way out if you can't boot!

The majority of motherboards have BIOS recovery these days, most IIRC 
use floppies to boot and flash a BIOS and others can use USB sticks.

As long as you're careful (make sure the power doesn't go off, flash the 
correct BIOS) then it's unlikely anything could go wrong.

>
>> You may however find that either a PCI (or PCI Express) SATA controller
>> or an IDE to SATA convertor may also do the job (it allows you to use an
>> SATA drive on an IDE connection)...
>
> I hadn't thought about a PCI SATA adaptor.  That might have been an easy
> answer.  The SATA/IDE adaptor would have been OK if I had two IDE slots.
> SATA adaptors can't do master/slave drives, so I would have lost the DVD
> drive.  I guess the new PCI drive will keep us going for the rest of the
> computer's life.
>

Yeah it is kind of annoying that motherboards only have one IDE 
connector (or in some cases none at all).

Rob



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