PC refusing to boot with IDE to SATA adapter
Posted by Nonstopmax@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 37 comments
Having a problem getting an old Pentium 4 system to boot with a Startech adapter plugged in. Always getting stuck on "Verifying DMI Pool Data" with the drive plugged in no matter what setting I change. BIOS is Phoenix AwardBIOS.
OpeningLetterhead343@reddit
I have a Silicon image PCI SATA controller (3114 I think). I use it to boot win2k on a SATA SSD. To use it, make sure you put the drivers on a floppy for the windows installer to use (F6 during initial installer loading). Some modded versions of xp install discs have the drivers built in.
I also tried many different IDE to SATA adapters, none worked properly. Either nothing at all or PIO mode 4, despite the claims of udma etc.
Anyway, YMMV but I'd just abandon those adapters and use a controller card.
Sample_And_Hold@reddit
How about a cheap PCI IDE/SATA controller? It bypasses any possible motherboard BIOS limitations and you don't have to deal with crazy adapters. I have one that can even work with Windows 98.
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
Is this plug and play or does it involve BIOS tinkering?
Sample_And_Hold@reddit
It is plug and play and it's similar to using a SCSI controller: it has its own boot BIOS for detecting drives.
NightmareJoker2@reddit
What kind of motherboard is this?
I have an ASUS P5Q-VM that has native SATA, but a similar issue: when the active partition doesn’t start at sector 63 (this is misaligned for an SSD!) or anywhere between that and the first 200 megabytes of space, the BIOS will refuse to boot from it.
This means, partitions aligned to the 1MiB boundary like Windows Vista and newer or modern versions of GNU Fdisk, GPT fdisk and libparted create them will not be bootable.
Try booting a GParted LIVE environment (you will need to use version 1.6.0 or older on a 32-bit only Pentium 4, this would be all socket 478 ones) from USB or CD (depending on what your system supports) and move/resize the boot partition that it starts at 200MiB and leave the space before it free.
If it boots then, you’re good. If not, you will need to partition the drive with Windows XP 32-bit (64-bit has GPT and alignment support) or older to make it work and live with the performance penalty of not having aligned sectors.
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
ECS Elitegroup L4S5MG/651+ problem is it will not boot to anything as long as the problem drive is connected so can't try that on the Pentium 4 system.
NightmareJoker2@reddit
Do you have a USB adapter? You can hot-plug those once booted into the Linux live system. You can also typically hot-plug SATA, though it does cause issues on some Marvell controllers if you do that too often or too frequently, requiring a reboot to work again.
You also don’t need to use the same system to repartition the drive. You can use a modern computer. Those IDE/PATA to SATA converters only support LBA mode anyway, no need for worrying about CHS nonsense. Since your drive is only 120GB, the 28-bit LBA limit (128GiB - 512bytes) isn’t the issue, but if it were, setting the HPA with hdparm to 268435455 sectors usually makes that work, too. Not all drives support configuring the host protected area (Intel SSDs do, but I’ve had issues with some Samsung 850 and 860 Pro drives). YMMV.
NextToday8378@reddit
The motherboard might be a problem because of chipset. Was got similar issues with MSI K8T Neo-V motherboard for AMD CPUs. It was got VIA chipset and the SSD works only via same connector as yours, depite having SATA ports. Because you have Pentium IV CPU for socket 478 I suggest you to look for motherboard with SATA ports and Intel chipset. Now I use this motherboard:
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-8IPE1000-G-rev-4x
And don't have need to use any IDE to SATA connector anymore, my 500 GB SSD SATA from Samsung works here flawless direcly connected to motherboard.
docshipley@reddit
Try flipping the IDE ribbon cable at the adapter end - in other words put pin 1 where you had pin 40. It won't hurt the computer or the drive if it's backward.
Every IDE-equipped computer I ever had would hang if the cable was connected upside down.
GGigabiteM@reddit
Those IDE to SATA adapters are always "there be dragons". A lot of things have to go right for those things to work, including the adapter itself. Lots of those adapters cause silent data corruption.
LBA is another problem. While LBA was mostly well established by the time of the Pentium 4, it didn't uniformly work the same way across different IDE controller manufactures. Broken BIOS implementations could further throw a wrench into that.
Another problem could be a race condition. The SSD could be responding to controller commands too fast for the controller, thus resulting in undefined behavior, or a crash.
You can try a different SSD, an actual hard drive instead, or try a different IDE to SATA adapter.
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
Would a native IDE SSD work? This is the only spare drive I have and I don't have an IDE drive to work with at the moment other than the original dying hard drive.
TheThiefMaster@reddit
My personal favourite for using in old ide systems is an SD adapter with an "A" rated SD card (A1 or A2). They're faster than old HDDs, and I've had no compatibility issues. Plus you can pop the card out to use it in a newer machine to drop files!
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
This sounds promising but the adapters I'm looking at seem to have similar compatibility problems and I don't want to throw money at another possible problem.
Niphoria@reddit
They are often just SATA SSDs with the converter inside.
Try using a CF card instead (IDE to CF)
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
I might try this later as this is an expensive option and I don't know what are good cheaper CF drives and don't want to throw money at another possible compatibility problem.
Niphoria@reddit
M.sata to IDE is very good as well and cheap.
I have multiple in my laptops and they all worked flawless.
GGigabiteM@reddit
Best compatibility would be a DOM (Disk On Module). They're made for industrial PC104 systems that use ancient x86 processors and work on most anything that doesn't have a CHS geometry limit. For that problem, XT-IDE can be used, or a DDO like OnTrack.
dgeurkov@reddit
also if you have non-ssd sata hard drive that might also work, worth trying
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
To test this out I grabbed a 1 TB archive HDD and system booted to the DVD drive with an XP install disc but I get a "INF file txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing, status 2" error there.
GGigabiteM@reddit
It would be more likely to work, but I can't guarantee it will work.
docshipley@reddit
As another commenter already suggested, I've had much better luck with Compact Flash adapters than IDE-to-SATA adapters.
I prefer Industrial rated CF media for a variety of reasons, but a lot of consumer grade cards are known to work.
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
I might try this later on as this is an expensive option and I don't know what are good cheaper CF drives and don't want to throw money at another possible compatibility problem.
spektro123@reddit
I used a cheap consumer CF on PII Win98 system. It’s been bought to be a storage for XP era industrial PC, but was too slow and ultimately was replaced with a HDD. It lasted a few boots of Windows at most and then got corrupted. Some consumer cards just can’t handle being used as swap storage.
bnelson333@reddit
I'm assuming you've already used this drive in a modern computer? That might be the problem. I always "clean" the disk before putting it in a retro computer because GPT confuses older hardware. But using the clean command in diskpart removes it completely.
It should put the drive back to a state like it was never used. Now you can take it out and put it back in the retro computer. I absolutely LOVE these startech adapters, I've never had a problem with them, but I always clean the drives first, so maybe that's the problem.
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
Doesn't disk management do the same thing?
DeepDayze@reddit
Very good suggestion for the OP to try. Perhaps with a clean disk and then partitioning and formatting with the correct tools should get this drive working with the adapter. Also if necessary install a DDO if the drive's size is not being reported correctly.
Gammitin@reddit
What OS is installed on it? If you're installing Win9x, you have to do: fdisk /mbr
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
No OS unallocated drive. This was going to be an XP install.
bhiga@reddit
If you can get it to boot from another device you can see if you can bootstrap it with Plop Boot Manager. It's been a while ago I don't remember the details but I used it to get Fujitsu Stylistic slates to boot from media the native BIOS didn't support.
spektro123@reddit
It looks like your disk is detected correctly. Can this PC boot without it? Can you boot it form a floppy disk? Try disconnecting all unnecessary peripherals. Leave only one stick of RAM, graphics card, monitor and keyboard plugged in.
echocomplex@reddit
Could the 120GB size be confusing the bios? Do you have something smaller you could test like 32GB or less?
Nonstopmax@reddit (OP)
The 120 GB SSD is the smallest I have on hand right now.
jussuumguy@reddit
You could try a Disk Overlay Software to format the Drive and enable LBA if it's not supported in the BIOS. This system may be too new for that. I used it on my 486 to install a 80 Gig Drive while the BIOS only supports a maximum size of roughly 2.
I used OnTrack Disk Manager. You'll need a working floppy drive.
echocomplex@reddit
If he uses a drive overlay, is it going to partition the drive into 60 2gb partitions lol. That could be awkward
jussuumguy@reddit
The program I used has support for later versions of Windows up to and including Windows XP so I assume you could choose a larger size but honestly I don't know. That would be mildly inconvenient....
Der_Unbequeme@reddit
i have the same problem with a Asrock P4VM800 Mainboard, this board has a IDE & SATA connectors, but a 120GB SSD will not work.
So i use a 1/2/4 SD to SSD Adapter with two 32GB cards.
MacKeyHack@reddit
some SSDs are 4k native sectors (advanced format), IDE was only ever 512 byte hard drives.