[arch-general] motherboard change - strategies for saving current install?

[Aaron Laws]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 9:53 AM, Aaron Laws <dartme18 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 2:15 AM, David C. Rankin <
> drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>   Aaron, the board is a GA-990FXA-UD3, and I will be making use of SATA
>> 5/6 (6 drives total), so I'll report back on any difficulties with the last
>> two drives. My current board (MSI k9n2 SLI platinum) had SATA 1-4 and ESATA
>> 5-6 on board. While the 990FXA list the SATA 5-6 as full SATA-III ports, I
>> wouldn't be surprised if they were in some way different from the
>> primary/secondary controller ports.
>>
>>
> That's the same board that I got last week. I don't remember SATA 5-6
> being different from 1-4; where did you see that? When I get back home,
> I'll double-check my manual and the box, but I don't see anything online
> suggesting that they're any different. I understood that all 6 SATA ports
> are SATA revision 3 (I assume that's the same as SATA-III), but I could be
> mistaken. I would like to believe that 5-6 are different than the others,
> because it would probably explain my earlier difficulties satisfactorily.
>


Ah, I got it. In BIOS, you can set SATA 4-5 (they're numbered base-zero) to
"IDE" rather than "SATA". I assume this means something like the
motherboard expects there to be a SATA->IDE adapter in there. Naturally,
there isn't in my setup, which could explain why I was having such
difficulties partitioning and putting file systems onto my drives when
connected to SATA 4 and 5. Thanks for the heads up here, and now you will
know to adjust this setting in BIOS (it's page 56 of my manual under "B.
Configuring SATA controller mode in BIOS Setup". So that's Peripherals,
OnChip SATA Port4/5 Type -- set to -- "AS SATA".)

Cheers!