How to force boot from AHCI/SATA before IDE

[marcmerlin]

I have virtualbox 4.1.14, and I have 2 disk images. My boot image is on my AHCI disk but virtualbox seems to only be setup to boot from the first IDE disk if present.
I can hit F12 at boot in the virtual bios and force an AHCI boot, and that works fine, but I shouldn't have to remember to do this in the 2 second window every single time.
I have however failed to find a way to force virtualbox to remember to boot from AHCI. Searches found old messages apparently complaining about a similar problem.
Is it still impossible to force a boot on AHCI before IDE?

Thanks,
Marc

[Perryg]

Is the IDE marked as master or slave?
What is the purpose of having two separate images & on different controllers?

[marcmerlin]

1) IDE image is marked as master, with CD image as slave
2) IDE image is an old w2k image I need to mount as is
3) SATA image is my new W7 image I boot with but I'm forced to use F12 with the right timing at each boot
So this is not a new config you'd do like that on purpose, but something I have and need to use as is

[ChipMcK]

I think what you are after is Dual Boot.
The following products may assist you in setting such up
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1
http://www.dualbootpro.org/

Both have directions for the setup

Be sure to back up before trying (copy the folder), took me three attempts as I recall

Best

[scottgus1]

Untested, but might work? Try putting the IDE drive on Slave? or Secondary master or slave?
Alternatively, can one take a vdi file that was attached to the VM's IDE port and attach it to the second SATA port instead? Would that hose the VM? If not, this could be tried, too.

[marcmerlin]

ChipMcK: I know about multiboot options, but I just wasn't keen on messing with my perfectly working w2k image to work around virtualbox's inability to simply let me tell it to always boot from AHCI first (which is raging since it supports it if I just hit F12 at boot).

scottgus: how about that: moving the drive to IDE slave didn't help, but against my expectations my image worked when I mounted it as an AHCI slave drive. I didn't expect a vmware image made with vmware 3.0 in 2002 would work as a SATA drive image 10 years later, but it did.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[scottgus1]

Glad you got it working!