Can't boot from SATA Port 4...

[FoxTer]

Hi all!
I'm create VM with SATA controller and SATA Port 4 slot, but when i'm pressing F12 during boot i got this:

"Detecting hard disks:
No hard disks found"

in SATA port 0-3 all works right...
what's the problem??

[FoxTer]

... up!

[fixedwheel]

Like a real SATA controller, VirtualBox's virtual SATA controller operates faster and also consumes less CPU resources than the virtual IDE controller. Also, this allows you to connect up to 30 virtual hard disks to one machine instead of just three, as with the VirtualBox IDE controller (with the DVD drive already attached). Of these, the first four (numbered 0-3 in the graphical user interface) are operated in IDE compatibility mode by default.

i guess the virtual BIOS needs "IDE compatibility mode" to boot a device

[squall leonhart]

you need a ICH8 AHCI/SATA driver floppy image.

or

install from IDE, install intel rapidstorage driver in windows
shutdown and switch the hdd image to the sata controller.

[mpack]

you need a ICH8 AHCI/SATA driver floppy image

A windows device driver is not going to help much at the BIOS boot stage. I suspect that Fixedwheel's response is probably dead-on.

[squall leonhart]

you need a ICH8 AHCI/SATA driver floppy image

A windows device driver is not going to help much at the BIOS boot stage. I suspect that Fixedwheel's response is probably dead-on.

Actually, he is wrong (and so am i), and i'll tell you why (but i know im wrong as well now after rereading).

the Bios can see SATA drives just fine without IDE Compatibility, IDE Compatibility mode allows a sata device to get into windows without having to require AHCI drivers (via the microsoft standard IDE drivers).

The op has created the HDD on sata port 4, however only the first 3 sata ports appear in the Boot device selector.

This isn't actually extraordinary behavior, alot of mainboards still only allow the first 3 sata ports to be bootable.

[Sasquatch]

Just open the XML file and you will see what the problem is. Just check out this:

Code: Select all

<StorageController name="SATA Controller" type="AHCI" PortCount="1" IDE0MasterEmulationPort="0" IDE0SlaveEmulationPort="1" IDE1MasterEmulationPort="2" IDE1SlaveEmulationPort="3">

Says enough. Port 4 is not mentioned, thus IDE emulation isn't used and booting from that doesn't work.

[FoxTer]

so, how I realized in the current version of VirtualBox is not possible to boot from real AHCI (sata port 4) controller?

[Sasquatch]

Correct. This is the same on normal hardware. To make it more clear, my PC does not have IDE emulation capabilities on the SATA ports in the BIOS (meaning I always need a SATA driver and Windows XP would not see the hard drive without it), yet I can boot from it. This is likely due to the 4 SATA ports the chipset provides that have this IDE boot emulation that VB uses in the same way. Even though I have two separate IDE controllers as well.

So from that point of view, VB does exactly what normal hardware does. It just differs in that you can go up to 20 SATA ports compared to your PC.