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bseabrooke
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October 10th, 2003 22:00
Installing a SATA Drive with an EIDE Boot Drive in a GX270
My Dell GX 270 mini tower came with an 80 GB EIDE HD and WXP installed. I am planning to add a second non-bootable storage SATA drive. I have received conflicting opinions as to whether this will work. The most common theme is that the system will always try to boot to the SATA drive and may lock up since there will not be an OS on that drive. I am planning to follow the below procedures:
Enable the SATA drive in the setup and then shut down
Install the SATA drive and reboot
I should receive an error message that my system can't find the boot drive. It may prompt me to boot from the C:\ (EIDE) drive. The system may also go to the EIDE automatically and continue to load WXP
Format the new HD using WXP then shut down
Enter setup again. I should see the SATA drive listed in the boot sequence. Use the space bar to delete it from the boot sequence
Reboot and the system will automatically go to the EIDE drive and load WXP
Are these procedures correct? If not, what changes are required?
Bill
Ok, What a HASSLE.
I had a similar situation.
I had the wrong drive shipped (got 80 MB IDE, wanted 120 MB SATA).
I shipped back the 80 MB IDE and got the replacement SATA drive. I finally got all the cables put in and the thing refused to recognize the new drive.
The Dell GX270 (Bios Rev A2) doesn't seem to allow it to autodetect new drives after initially configured.
Solution:
- Press F2 to Enter Setup
- Press Alt-F to reset system settings to the default setting
- Save settings and reboot.
See Note:
http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/systems/opgx270/en/ug/advfeat.htm#1128164
---- Clifford -----
bseabrooke,
Can you e-mail me and let me know what you came up with on this issue? I am trying to force a couple GX270 to boot from IDE over SATA and have been unsuccessful. Did you resolution work? Thanks.
MichaelCretired
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1291 Posts
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Posted October 13th, 2003 11:00
bseabrooke,
Thanks for using the Dell Community Forum.
I'm sorry but Dell doesn't have much information doing what you want to do. Let's keep this here and hopefully somebody will come along with some useful information.