[svlug] ATA to SATA

[Scott Hess]

On Feb 11, 2008 1:35 PM, Debian Intermediate <jj1234ff at lycos.com> wrote:
> Then I plugged in both ATA and SATA. Looks like the mobo
> boots from ATA master boot record and I get debian.
> No way to boot from SATA with and ATA plugged in.

Generally, you can instruct the BIOS which device to boot from.
Unfortunately, that may not appropriately be picked up by the kernel,
so you can get into cases where the BIOS tries to boot from one device
but the kernel wants to look to the other device and you get poor
results.  Usually you can overcome this with the right combination of
kernel parameters.

If that doesn't work, you can convince lilo to write to the other
drive using a combination of the 'disk' and 'bios' parameters in
lilo.conf.  I've always found this to be a black art.  The 'disk' line
is configuring the disk you're writing to, while the 'bios' line is
configuring the disk you will be reading from at boot time - which are
not the same thing, otherwise you wouldn't be having this problem!
BTW, I'd be surprised if your new install isn't wanting to use grub by
default.

Since you say you wish to retire the ATA drive, I think there are two
good options that are probably simpler than figuring these things out:

 - Pop the ATA drive in an external USB case, or use a dongle.  With
only the SATA drive internally, you should be able to easily install
and boot and copy everything you want over.

 - Pull the ATA drive, and install as you want the SATA drive to be
installed.  Put the ATA drive back in, and boot a livecd and copy over
everything you want copied over.  Pull the ATA drive and the SATA
should take over.

Later,
scott