Pavillon 570 boot from SATA instead of M2 ssd

[crossup]

Machine is the newer 570 with Intel i3 and an on the motherboard SSD(factory config).

I want to test a migration technique that requires me booting from a SATA HD.  BIOS sees the drive, as does windows and if I remove the SSD then  it fails to find a boot device. But dianositic  will see and test the SATA drive as ok. Its telling me there is no OS there yet the drive boots  fine in its original machine. I dont expect it to boot without issue (different hardware) except eventually into safe mode which is the intent.

So question one: can the 570 boot from SATA, if so how?

question two- I suspect the issue is the drive being a simple volume MBR partition, what does the 570 need to see the OS?

[mdklassen]

> question one: can the 570 boot from SATA, if so how?

Enter BIOS SETUP, and set the SATA disk-drive as a "bootable" device, within the possible existence of the "hard-drive group".

Sometimes, the list of bootable devices lists "groups", e.g., "CD/DVD group" and "hard-drive group",

to allow for the existence of more than one member in a specific group, rather than listing individual devices.

> question two- I suspect the issue is the drive being a simple volume MBR partition, what does the 570 need to see the OS?

I do not share your suspicion.  See question #1.

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[crossup]

mdklassen, yes of course any boot drive has to be designated. But the key is not doing that but rather one must configure the BIOS to not use UEFI devices- as the SATA and SSD are in the same "group" and one can not pick members of the group individually. Removeing UEFI support prevents the SSD from being available but lets the SATA drive still work. I

So since my post here I made a lot of progress figuring it out myself.

Much to my surprise I was able to boot a Win10 install done on another machine(much older hardware), it appears the UEFI support is beyond what the norm is. In particular the UEFI/bios  generally doesnt like a 32 bit OS  being a 64 bit device. And its also my experience swapping drives between significantly different hardware  doesnt work without using safe mode to replace the drivers to correspond with the hardware changes. So I conclude legacy support circumvents the requirement for a 64 bit OS.

Despite those factors, by turning off secure boot and UEFI boot drives I was able to boot a 32 bit win 10 install with no issues, did not even have to do the driver/safe mode trick.

So while legacy(CSM?) mode is slower, it does allow one to boot from SATA devices even with 32 bit OS installs.

[mdklassen]

> the SATA and SSD are in the same "group" and one can not pick members of the group individually. 

Can one order the members of that group, to give the lower priority to the SSD ?

[crossup]

No it does not allow that since as I said you can not select members....there is a config option but it only returns the config info of the drive, which can not be modified.

[mdklassen]

It's the computer that selects the top-most member of the group.

So, can you "order" the members of the group, to put the SATA device at the top?

Sometimes, it is the "page-up/page-down" keys that effect the ordering of the selected device.

[crossup]

The bios does not allow you to order members of a group. And in my case as it turns out, using a 32 bit OS on the SATA would eliminate it as boot candidate under UEFI. Legacy mode allows 32 bit OSs obviously since it worked.

So while interesting, this a moot point now and my original need to do this has been circumvented so its likely knowledge I'll never use- but then again my head is full of stuff I'll not use.

Your input, regardless, is much appreciated.