<Solved>PCI To SATA Adapter

[Ray2047]

I am trying to get my SATA HD from my main computer to work in my backup computer, P4. The computer has no SATA connection so I bought a PCI card to add SATA. I thought it would be recognized but it isn't. Is this because of Bios and un-fixable or is there some way to get it to work. No mention of SATA in Bios.I know after the fact I'm thinking I should have went USB but I thought the PCI route would be faster (data wise). Any way I can get this to work or am I screwed? Thanks in advance.

Please note I am out of disk space so if I need to download packages to make it work I'm double screwed but tell me anyway.

[Village Idiot]

The USB can be quite fast if you use a USB3 adapter which your machine would not have. I doubt by the vintage of your machine's cpu you'd notice much difference between the two interfaces. But I suppose every little mb/s faster counts.   

What is the chipset of the Sata card? What are the specs of the computer. Is it possible you could have a dead card. Is it brand new? Bonus dumb question -  Is the card seated in the PCI slot correctly?

 

[Ray2047]

I had a small wattage light light bulb go off over my head after asking. I found the SATA controller in PCC>Hardware and now Know the HD does show up as SCSI. I need to see if I can set the computer to boot from SCSI and I will be back.  Thanks for your patience with my dumbness.

[TerryH]

You may need to change the BIOS setting for boot order due to it being connected via the PCI bus.

[Ray2047]

You may need to change the BIOS setting for boot order due to it being connected via the PCI bus.

First it isn't really SCSI that just seems to be one of those weird Linux things. The regular PATA IDE drive is also listed in Sysinfo as SCSI. I did set to SCSI but then realized the drive wasn't showing in Bios. Next I thought I could use the PATA drive's grub to boot it. Used RedoMBR but that didn't work and now I can't boot from the HD. Calling it quits for tonight. Will try a fresh install tomorrow.

[Ray2047]

OK I fixed it to my satisfaction. There was probably a more elegant solution but I just put the Boot on a small IDE PATA HD the Bios could see and everything else on the Sata drive Bios didn't see.

[T6]

i haven't played with this cards lately but i believe that you did the best thing that could be done here

well the other is replace motherboard for one with the ports you need while being compatible with the cpu and ram you have, not that complicated and not that bad idea