The Mother Board

[videobruce]

Sorry I couldn't come up with a better title, but it would of been too long.

Situation: New build;
ASRock 990FX Ext 4 MB,
Will be running Win7,
Two drives transfered over from nForce 570 MB as is,
New SSD & 1TB HDD, neither formatted,
All drives SATA,
MB is set for AHCI for all ports.

Questions;
1. Can individual SATA ports be disabled?
2. In the UEFI interface (BIOS) under Storage, there is a external eSATA port option to enabler or disable the SATA ESP for each of the six SATA ports. What is that suppose to mean?
3. I enabled the "AMD AHCI BIOS ROM" option, but I see no difference during boot.?
4. Is there the ability to use a conventional old school BIOS?

Now here is the kicker;
When I connect either to ports 7 or 8 which uses a Marvell controller, both have been able to boot into XP by themselves. I though this was impossible unless you radically modify them to do so. But when I switch either over to ports 1-6, the BIOS sees them, but both produce a BSOD as expected (until now on the other controller). How can this happen??
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Copyright protection & Intellectual property my ass. All the studios want is more money & control. Enough is enough!

[Toby B.]

From what I can decipher from the manual:

1 and 2
3 and 4
5 and 6

^^ are paired so individual (like just 1) disability won't work AFAIK..

7 and 8 are listed separately but mentioned on the same Marvell controller, so I do not know if you can disable one of them and not the other but did see this in the manual..

[Mr T]

2) It means that you can set each port to eSATA mode which is hot swappable and will pick it up as a removable drive - handy if you have hard drive caddies to swap drives about.

3)ACHI mode generally won't make to much of a difference to boot, but transferring big files it does tend to speed things along...

4) No, once it has a UEFI BIOS, no going back. I now find it a lot easier to use as it lacks leftover legacy stuff like floppy drive support.. On the old style boards always had to disable it, even though there was no floppy port.

On your last note, if the two drives booted from a Marvell controller on the old board, they generally will boot in to windows if attached to a marvell controller on the new board... However, it is always best to do a clean install..
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I have been programming on computers since the ZX81.
I am an apprentice trained Electronics Engineer with qualifications to back it up.
I have been repairing computers since 1996.
Yet to some people I still know nothing...

[videobruce]

Toby B.;
Six ports in three pairs, but all off the same controller.
I was aware of port 8 being shared with the eSAT function.