[svlug] ATA to SATA

[Scott Hess]

On Feb 11, 2008 10:06 PM, Debian Intermediate <jj1234ff at lycos.com> wrote:
> I didn't see a boot option in bios to
> choose other than CDROM, hard drive, FLoppy.
> Hard drive always picks ATA first as boot device
> if present.

Looking at my BIOS (Phoenix AwardBIOS on an Asus M2A-VM motherboard),
I can select one option like you describe above, and a separate option
lets me select the order of the hard disks themselves.  I have an ATA
and a SATA in this box, it looks like I can juggle them - but the SATA
isn't bootable and the ATA is, so I can't really test whether it would
work as it looks like it would.

> I guess I'll boot with both drives plugged in
> and format.
> Is reiser or some other file system format the most
> reliable these days?

No idea.  I use ext3 because I have _zero_ doubts as to whether I will
be able to read it if anything comes up.

> Next:

I can't speak to your sequence of events.  Might or might not work.
The sequence I suggested earlier was:

- disconnect the ATA hard drive.
- boot your appropriate install media and setup the SATA drive.  Since
it's the only drive in the system, this should work.
- connect the ATA drive and boot a livecd.
- mount both drives and copy anything you want copied.
- disconnect the ATA drive and recycle it or whatever.

As I mentioned, you could also dump the ATA drive into an external USB
enclosure.  That would make the whole process very convenient, albeit
slower.

I'm not sure I would recommend bother with lilo for a new system build
these days unless you have an overriding requirement of some sort.
Grub seems to be the way everyone is going.  Actually, make that "has
gone", grub isn't the future, it's the present!

> # Actually, might not be anything to edit
> # since I doesn't the SATA shift down to /dev/hda from
> # hdb when ATA drive is unplugged?

Whether the SATA drive will manifest as /dev/hda is entirely dependent
on your setup.  Most current Linux systems are likely to use libata
and the SATA drives will appear as /dev/sda and so on (yes, really, as
SCSI devices).  But in many cases you can tell the BIOS to configure
your SATA drive as an ATA drive (often labeled with "compatibility" in
the BIOS menus), in which case it would use the regular ATA drivers
and look like /dev/hda or /dev/hdb or so on.

-scott