Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

[Flocons De Mais]

... Gigabyte board? Whenever I disable the IDE drives/controller in the bios of my MA785GMT-UD2H they still show up in windows and operate as usual. After a frustrating back and forth with Gigabyte Support they finally replied that it was an AMD limitation and the option to disable the IDE controller would be unavailable in future bios releases. I assume they mean a limitation with this chipset since I don't recall ever having trouble disabling IDE drives on any of my previous AMD boards.

Another issue I have with this board and the IDE controller is that whenever I wish to install an OS and have the boot loader installed to my default boot drive (my 640GB SATA drive) I have to "disable" the IDE controller or it will install the boot loader to the IDE drive. I'm not sure if that's a bios or hardware issue but I've never had that problem before either. "Disabling" the IDE controller before installing does fix it but the drives still show up in Windows, however. They had no response on that issue.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

You should be able to, but since Gigabyte said you may not be able to due to chipset limitations then that may very well be true. Sorry, not sure as I do not use AMD.

In your manual it looks to be possible, but that was based on the older or original BIOS, simply by disabling the "OnChip IDE Channel"

For your bootloader issues, you can use VistaBootPro to install any bootloader onto any disk you like, or not install on any disk. Really not sure what you are doing here though as normally the bootloader (If you mean Vista/windows 7) will only install to the drive you are installing the OS on

[Flocons De Mais]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

For your bootloader issues, you can use VistaBootPro to install any bootloader onto any disk you like, or not install on any disk.

Yes, I use EasyBCD for meddling with bootloaders, but it shouldn't be happening in the first place. If I have a linux or OSX installation on my IDE drive, Windows will likely* overwrite the bootloader (*I haven't tested this but that would be the normal behaviour).

Really not sure what you are doing here though as normally the bootloader (If you mean Vista/windows 7) will only install to the drive you are installing the OS on

Windows usually installs the bootloader to the default boot drive set in BIOS.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

Windows Vista and or Windows 7 only installs a bootloader once, when you install, and it would only be installed to the physical drive the OS is installed to. And as you know, whatever drive this is, Vista/Win7 renames this drive as "C" anyway so even if it is not this would be the only drive with a bootloader on it.

I do not use OSX though, but I would advise you install it last, then adjust your boot options

[Flocons De Mais]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

Windows Vista and or Windows 7 only installs a bootloader once, when you install, and it would only be installed to the physical drive the OS is installed to. And as you know, whatever drive this is, Vista/Win7 renames this drive as "C" anyway so even if it is not this would be the only drive with a bootloader on it.

I do not use OSX though, but I would advise you install it last, then adjust your boot options

The bootloader is installed to the default boot drive you have assigned in bios. What good is a bootloader on an OS drive if the bios doesn't boot to it? Are you saying that the Windows installer changes the default boot drive in bios? I have W7 on my second SATA drive and the bootloader is installed to the first partition on my first SATA drive. (With this MB, with the IDE enabled, it will install it to the first IDE drive)

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

What I am saying is vista/win7 installs and makes whatever drive you choose to install to "C"

Like if you have disk 1 in the BIOS set to boot drive, but install Vista/Win7 to disk 2 while in that system disk 2 will be "C". Even if you have for example 4 partitions on one drive, and install vista to the last partition, the bootloader will be installed to that partition, and while inside vista that partition will be "C" and not "F" as it would normally be.

[Flocons De Mais]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

What I am saying is vista/win7 installs and makes whatever drive you choose to install to "C"

Like if you have disk 1 in the BIOS set to boot drive, but install Vista/Win7 to disk 2 while in that system disk 2 will be "C". Even if you have for example 4 partitions on one drive, and install vista to the last partition, the bootloader will be installed to that partition, and while inside vista that partition will be "C" and not "F" as it would normally be.

I don't care about drive letters. I merely disagree with your assertion that:

"Windows 7 only installs a bootloader once, when you install, and it would only be installed to the physical drive the OS is installed to"

I'm saying that the bootloader (Boot folder, bootmgr) will be installed to the active partition (which is usually the first) of your default boot drive, regardless of which partition or physical drive you install Windows. My boot loader is on the first partition of my 640Gb drive (the default boot drive) and I have windows installed on 3 different physical drives. I installed a bootloader on one of the other drives by setting it as the default in bios and repairing with the recovery disc.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

This is not true, it will only install to the drive/partition you choose at the point of install, all other drives and partitions will be left alone.

You can of course do what you said in the last part of your comments, I was only referring to the normal procedure of installing and what happens when doing things that way.

We both may be confused about what is being meant/said though, but you should be fine to install OSX Before or after Vista/Win7, just depending on which way you do it you may need to reinstall the bootloader. If you install OSX last you may need to add it to vista's bootloader, however you would do that and I am sure you can as I believe I have read a guide on this before. If you install OSX First, you can also install Vista into the grub bootloader as well using a similar method. Neither will actually cause the other to fail, only make it so you would need to edit one or the others booting process.

No need to switch drives around in the boot order of the BIOS. Do you need a guide on setting things up like I mentioned here, if so which way around?

[Flocons De Mais]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

This is not true, it will only install to the drive/partition you choose at the point of install, all other drives and partitions will be left alone.

This goes against every thing I have ever seen and I've installed windows xp/vista/7 well over a hundred times. I can't see the sense in Windows installing a boot loader to a drive/partition that won't be booted! The active partition of the default boot drive is the location the system looks for a boot loader when it is booted.

Maybe, if you multi-partition a raw unpartitioned drive (that is the default boot drive) in Windows setup and install Windows to partition 2,3,or 4... setup will set the install partition as active and install the boot loader there but if there already is an active partiton on the drive, it will install the new bootloader there, or add an entry to or replace any existing bootloader (depending on the previous OS). Windows 7 setup will either create a separate partition for it's boot loader/recovery wim or use an existing one. If you're installing to a different drive than the default boot drive, it will install the boot loader to an existing active partition on the default boot drive, or add an entry to an existing boot loader.

Do you need a guide on setting things up like I mentioned here, if so which way around?

I don't need help setting anything up. I use chain0 to load OSX. The point of the post was to find out whether anyone else was seeing this issue either with this board or other Gigabyte boards and to note the potential fallout from Windows installing a bootloader to a drive unexpectedly (one where you may have another bootloader for OSX or Linux.)

[Psycho101]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

For the IDE issue maybe it depends on what controllers are being used for the ports on that board. On some AMD boards, the SATA ports are on the SB and the IDE on a separate controller. On other boards the manufacturer has chosen to completely not use the AMD SB SATA capabilities, instead using a Marvell SATA and IDE controller combined. If your board uses this config then it won't let you disable the IDE ports because it'd also disable all SATA ports. You'd have to do your own research into what's being used on your board etc, this is just a suggestion, not saying it's what's happening.


To add my experience to Windows boot loader issues, Windows often installs a bootloader to a location you would not expect it to. I've encountered situations when using two drives and installing Windows to the second drive (according to SATA/IDE port positions) it will on occasion install the boot loader/MBR to the first drive. Upon removal of this first drive (that should be fine to do if it's a data drive) Windows fails to boot. Also in one instance a seemingly perfect Windows installation would fail to boot unless the USB stick (that was plugged in during installation) was present. Removing it gave a missing NTLDR error. This is why I now always decide what ports a customers drives will be on, then just plug in the boot drive and CD-ROM, install the OS and then add the storage drive(s) after to be set up in Disk Management

If installing Windows on a system with an OS already installed then Windows will seek out the previous boot loader, and if it finds one will install the Windows loader there. As said, that's because that location will be set to active and thus be capable of booting the system. Note that Win 7 will on a drive to itself, install the loader to the System Partition. If you pre-partition the drive before install to prevent the 100MB partition being made it will use the same partition as the install destination as that's the only place available

What OS to install first depends on how aware the OS's are to other OS installations. From past experience the multi boot rules are:

For multi booting different Windows versions, install the oldest OS first, Eg install XP then Vista and then 7 to end up with a working multi boot system with a Windows 7 boot loader and 3 options. The loader is installed on what ever partition is active, usually the loader ends up on the XP partition.

For different OS's co-existing it depends on the combination. Windows is famous for "hating" other OS's in that it often leaves the other OS unbootable because it doesn't know how to handle multi booting. Also it can be because it's not capable of reading/handling other file systems such as ext3/ext4 used with Linux. Some bootloaders can just appear as invalid data to Windows and it thinks it's doing you a favour by replacing what it thinks is a corrupt/broken loader with its own.

As a complete mirror opposite, Linux is brilliant at handling multi boot if installed after Windows. It will offer to re-size the Windows partition if needed and use the free space to create an EXT3/4 and Swap partition. The boot loader, eg Grub, again will be installed over the top of the Windows one in what ever partition it was stored in. Unlike Windows, no editing should be needed to get all OS's to show up in the menu.

It is possible to tweak so that you can load both OSX again and Windows after installing Windows last. However I'd probably opt (if possible)to install Windows first then OSX or install windows second and then do a repair install of OSX/run any repair utility that OSX has. This is assuming that like other Unix derived OS's (ie Linux) OSX is very "Windows aware". Hopefully OSX will work in this way. If not then I'm sure you know how to edit the loaders of the OS you use. Windows is easy to do either in Windows settings or using something like EasyBCD. Linux and OSX may be similar or may need a config file editing and using the command structure for the OS in question.

[Flocons De Mais]

Re: Can you disable IDE controllers on your AMD...

For the IDE issue maybe it depends on what controllers are being used for the ports on that board. On some AMD boards, the SATA ports are on the SB and the IDE on a separate controller. On other boards the manufacturer has chosen to completely not use the AMD SB SATA capabilities, instead using a Marvell SATA and IDE controller combined. If your board uses this config then it won't let you disable the IDE ports because it'd also disable all SATA ports. You'd have to do your own research into what's being used on your board etc, this is just a suggestion, not saying it's what's happening.

This board uses the SATA and the IDE of the AMD710 southbridge. Support said it can't be disabled so I'll take their word for it.

To add my experience to Windows boot loader issues, Windows often installs a bootloader to a location you would not expect it to. I've encountered situations when using two drives and installing Windows to the second drive (according to SATA/IDE port positions) it will on occasion install the boot loader/MBR to the first drive.

If the first drive is set as the default boot drive, that is where it should install it and where I would expect it to be installed.

Upon removal of this first drive (that should be fine to do if it's a data drive) Windows fails to boot.

No boot loader, no boot. Makes sense. Easily fixed with the recovery cd/DVD.

Note that Win 7 will on a drive to itself, install the loader to the System Partition. If you pre-partition the drive before install to prevent the 100MB partition being made it will use the same partition as the install destination as that's the only place available

Yes, if it's your only drive OR the default boot drive in a multi-drive setup. If you create multiple partitions on the drive and install Win 7 to any other partition than the first, it will install the boot loader to the first partition. (if you already have the install partition set as active, I think it will do the same and set the first as active, but I'm not sure about that scenario) If you have another drive set as the default boot drive, the installer will install the boot loader to the active partition of that drive, or add the new Win7 entry to the existing Windows boot manager .