setting disk boot order

[cecinit]

HPE 490t

Windows 7 SP1 x64

I need to make sure I boot from a specific disk, but I want to have other disks enabled for boot

in case that preferred disk fails.   I can't figure out how to do what I want.  The devil is in the details.

The details:

I added, some time ago, an SSD which boots & runs Windows a lot faster than any HDD,

However, SSD's have their own failure issues and it would be useful to have the internal disks

capable of booting also.    This is doable - but what happens then, is they  are then always preferred.

This is not desirable.

The internal disks are on SATA ports 1 & 2.  

The DVD is on port 3.

The SSD is on port 4.

Switching the SSD to port 1 seems to disable the USB 3.0 PCI board, because anything on the USB 3.0

ports then disappears.  That's bizarre, but reproducible, and not desirable at all.

Moving one of the internal drives to port 4 doesn't matter - the system will still boot from the internal

drives and the SSD will be mounted  later.  

Messing around with the BIOS doesn't seem to help.  It's on the old side (last available update in 2010?).

BIOS  doesn't show support for USB booting - but the system will boot from a USB device if one is installed  -

if nothing else is attached that is preferred.  

It doesn't seem possible to order the disks or the SATA ports for booting purposes. 

It is possible to enable/disable SATA drives in BIOS, but disabling them disables them completely - they don't appear at all.

What do I want?  I want the SSD preferred.  I want an installed Windows on the internal SATA HDDs if possible, 

but not preferred - 2nd choice after SSD.  Failing that, a bootable USB 3.0 external drive would be useful, if

that's an option that people recommend (I haven't tried building one yet).  

Any advice appreciated.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

cecinit

Typically, there are two different "ordering" options you can set.

One determines the sequence of boot device types -- such that you can order among floppy drives, hard drives, USB drives, etc.

The other determines the sequence of selection of hard drives -- such that you can order your preferred boot drive to the front of the list.

There is no way to have the loader jump to a different hard drive than the one in the front of the list, if that one contains boot information.

However, if you install GRUB 2 (from a Linux disk), and since you have boot info on each of several different hard drives, then you can manually add a "stanza" for each device and select the one you want during boot.

Since this is basically a Linux function, you would do best checking on a Linux forum as to how to do this. I recommend the Ubuntu forums:  http://ubuntuforums.org/

Good Luck

[cecinit]

I'm still thinking about that, & it certainly seems like a solution, but I think I am going

to try putting a spare system on a spare drive, to keep this simple, and just staying away

from the internal SATA ports.  Thanks, ==mwh