Pass boot to mPCIe hard drive?

[flyingfishfinger]

All-
I've done some modding to my X61 laptop, including the 8GB RAM (Ebay) and an mSATA SSD that I housed in the PCMCIA card slot.
The thinking was that I can boot from my SSD and have an empty hard drive slot where I can put anything else, like a 1TB drive or something. To that end, I got this adapter: PM362 from HWTools. It's recognized, but only works if I power it up post boot, hangs the boot process if I keep it in during boot.

The other issue I have is that I permanently sacrificed the SATA port in the hard drive slot for my SSD mod, so I can't connect and boot from any further SATA drives. My question is whether it's possible to have GRUB (or anything else) reside on my SSD and pass boot to this mPCIe adapter?
Thanks,

Rafael

EDIT: This relates to my dual hard-drive hack in my old thread that I just dragged back up. Read there too!

[tjwasiak]

If this device is seen by BIOS you can use grub or Boot It Bare Metal installed on device directly bootable by BIOS.

[Medessec]

These are some insane modifications you've made to your X61... respect to you from trying, but these modifications are pretty far out of the scope of the X61's design.

I'm not sure exactly how you've worked out connecting the mSATA SSD, sounds like you've completely gutted the SATA port for it's pins, to wire up the mSATA SSD? If you've done it correctly, then that's not the problem, other than that's occupying your only straight SATA connector.

I'm pretty sure the reason the mini PCI-E SATA adapter doesn't work is because the laptop's hardware is really not built for it. The first card slot is made for a Wi-Fi card, and the second for a WAN card, that's it. Although other cards and devices might work, you can only get so far with them. The reason it probably freezes the post when you leave it in and power it on is because the BIOS can't understand what it is, and has a massive brain fart. But when you wait until your machine boots Windows, and then plug it in, I guess the same BIOS check that locks the machine up doesn't happen, or just doesn't affect Windows. And because Mini PCI-E is Plug-N-play, Windows will still install it and it'll work.

I highly doubt you'll be able to get the card to work in a permanent situation. You'd have to see if there's a modified X61 BIOS you can use, or some similar solution.

[flyingfishfinger]

Hi-
Yes, you're right. Well, I didn't gut the motherboard itself, I gutted the little board that breaks out the SATA connector to the hard drive bay. I got an mSATA carrier board (this thing), housed that in the PCMCIA slot and ran a regular SATA cable to what's left of the little board. There wasn't room for the height of the actual connector under the keyboard, or I would have kept that.

You bring up a good point, I don't know much about BIOSes. I have Middleton's BIOS that gets me SATA II speeds, and also lets me supposedly run other things in the 2nd mini PCIe slot (I'm guessing that's why it is recognized post-boot but I may be wrong). I think it didn't work with the original BIOS. The Startech card doesn't work at all, with any BIOS.

I have this other crazy idea. I've read rumors that the ICH8M supports SATA port multiplication. In that case, we can throw something like the Sil3723 on there and add another (probably bootable) channel. Voila! Downside is, that requires a custom PCB design, but that's not that hard to do. Whether custom drivers are required, that's a whole different story...

R

[twistero]

Yeah, looks like the more pressing issue is that the computer won't boot with the SATA controller card. There's pretty much nothing you can do if BIOS doesn't play nice with it.

If you can get past that, there are ways to "pass boot to the SATA controller". On Linux, the (more or less) standard method is to have the boot loader (GRUB), kernel and initial ramdisk reside where BIOS can read, which in this case is the mSATA SSD, and include whatever kernel modules required for the SATA controller in the initrd. Once the initrd is loaded the kernel can then access devices connected to the SATA controller.
GRUB2 looks very modular, and there might be a way to add device drivers to it. If you can manage that, then only GRUB2 is required to be on the mSATA SSD.

[Temetka]

What an interesting project.

Ok I know the X61 series can boot from a flash drive.

So can you use one of these to stick GRUB on?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SANDISK-Cruzer- ... 1136670601

[flyingfishfinger]

Well, the flash drive will let me boot (as will my SSD), but if it's a BIOS issue, then I'm not sure how that would help either. I already have Middleton's BIOS for SATA II and whitelisting the mini PCIe slot.
I'm waiting to hear back from Silicon Image to see if they have samples of their SATA port multiplier...

R