Professional Geekism

I’ve just had to setup Windows on a physical machine (shudder) to control and monitor the IOMeter disk benchmarks that are needed for my final year project. I didn’t try to run it in Wine, but I suppose I should’ve. Needless to say, I do require it to be perfect in order to maintain the fairness of my testing, so Windows was unfortunately my first choice.

Due to the age of the hardware I had lying around; an old Athlon XP-M system with an Abit NF7-S 2.0 and 512MB of ‘borrowed’ memory (thanks Ian), it was safe to say that it wouldn’t be any good installing Vista on it. Therefore I downloaded and burnt an XP ISO from my MSDN account and set about installing XP to the 200GB SATA drive I had (thanks Neillans, actually!)

The Abit NF7-S range of boards (particularly the V2.0) were highly-regarded during their hay-day: a testament to Abit’s awesome legacy. Not least for their inclusion of SATA ports way back in 2002, when Serial ATA was a relatively new feature on desktop boards. It even included basic RAID functions across the twin ports, courtesy of the Sil3112r chipset, which is still sold today if you look hard enough. When this was my main motherboard I actually ran a pair of 36GB WD Raptors in RAID-0 (scarily the same pair I use as my root drive now! I’m poor, OK?) and everything worked extremely well.. I never had a single problem with it.

But fast-forward to installing XP onto a SATA single disk, and I was stumped for a little while. Aside from the faff in convincing my floppy drive to work with the board (I’d previously disabled it via three, separate options in the BIOS — nightmare) I then had XP’s installation looping continuously, instead of booting from the HDD to continue with the second phase of the installation. It was almost as if XP was failing to write NTLDR into the MBR, somehow.

Now by convention on modern motherboards, SATA ports can typically be set to three modes: RAID, AHCI, and IDE. The latter of which is used purely for compatibility with older operating systems. However, the ‘RAID’ mode typically prevents that particular disk from being presented as a possible boot disk by marking it for use within RAID arrays only. It’s all fairly self-explanatory, however.

However, within the NF7-S’s BIOS, there are no such options. You can either enable/disable the SATA chipset, and optionally enable/disable the ‘SATA RAID ROM’, which you would believe would be only required if creating RAID arrays. I didn’t wish to use the RAID features and therefore I didn’t intend on ear-marking the disk as a RAID disk, as I wanted to boot from it. Sounds sensible, right?

Sadly, unless this ROM option is actually enabled, regardless of whether or not I wished to use any of the RAID features; the disks will not be presented as boot disks. Quite why there is even an option in the first place is beyond me! Because of this, the XP installation CD was failing to find a suitable boot disk and was therefore intent on looping endlessly through the first phase of the installation process. Fun times…

It has since occurred to me just how far SATA adoption and usability has actually come in the last 5-6 years. With most chipsets now natively including anything from two to eight AHCI SATA ports, as well as incorporating much better integration into the BIOS menus. Similarly, with natively AHCI-aware operating systems such as Linux, Solaris (and friends), many BSDs, Vista (and Windows 7!) now becoming largely common-place, there are few reasons for any of the IDE-compatibility options any longer.

That is, unless you’ve only got a single-core processor, 512MB of memory and an old, awkward (but great) motherboard. I just wish the IOMeter devs would consider creating a GTK+/QT4 front-end for dynamo!