First post. This is not a request for any particular bios. My interest is in keeping quite old computers going. Many of these have SATA outlets on the mobo and it is possible to boot from a SATA HDD. However, none of them will boot a SATA CD/DVDROM. I've tried to do this through boot loaders without success. I've started reading the stickies, but I would just like to know whether my journey will be worthwhile, so that at the end of the day I will have BIOSes which will boot a CD/DVDROM. All the OSes, Windows and Linux distros use these drives without a problem,after the OS is launched, and Bioses on newer machines can boot from these drives. I'd be grateful for any help or advice.
A quick fix would be to install from USB stick instead. For W7-8.1 use "Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool", a Microsoft tool. For XP use Rufus. If the BIOS doesn't natively support boot from USB, have a go with PLOP. It sounds unlikely that most or all of your systems won't boot from a SATA connected CDROM/DVD. Some MSI boards I tried disliked the W7 bootloader, but they'd go along with the Vista bootloader. Have you tried booting from a Linux CD?
I've tried most things,including plop, without success. Many of these old BIOSes only offer USB-FDD and not USB-HDD, which makes meaningful booting from the USB drive unlikely. After trying all the software "solutions", I was left with the idea that if only the BIOS could recognize an ATAPI drive on the SATA outlet as bootable, I'd be OK. Some of the BIOSes will recognize the DVDROM drives as such but will only boot from HDDs connected to the SATA outlets. It's clearly possible, since most newer BIOSes can do this. Of course, it would be easy to just connect an IDE DVDROM drive, but new ones are becoming more difficult to find. PS I've clicked the thanks for the reply on your post, but I would just like to record my thanks here.
Maybe if you posted what motherboards you're having problems with, someone with a similar system could chip in with their experiences? You can use PLOP in this way: Take out your HDD and format it on some other system. Install PLOP into the MBR of that drive. Replace the HDD into the original system. Boot up and you'll get a PLOP meny that is loaded from the HDD's MBR. That menu will allow boot from USB (and other units), regardless of what the BIOS says. If you install Windows on that HDD it will overwrite the MBR and the PLOP program. But that's OK, since you will now not need to boot from the USB again.
Thanks for the reply. According to Elmar Hanlhofer (the writer of plop) it may well not work on my systems as far as the USB is concerned and it will not boot linux without an auxiliary bootloader - this was in a PM to me. Unfortunately, I do not have a spare SATA HDD at hand, but when I acquire one (hopefully soon), I'll give your idea a whirl.
I assumed you wanted to install Windows, but now I'm not sure. What is it you want to accomplish? Run a live Linux system from CDROM?
Most of the linux/puppylinux OSes come as DVD or CD isos. These machines all have at least one OS - some with Windows XP. To repair a Windows installation you may need to boot off the system CD or DVD. Without a bootable CD/DVD drive you're pretty much stymied, especially as the USB is only USB-FDD and not USB-HDD. As I said I've explored the software possibilities and none have worked so far. It's no big deal - I do have IDE CD/DVD drives I can draft in pro tem from other PCs, though they clearly will need replacing sometime in the future by SATA DVD drives.
Everything will have to be replaced at some time in the future... I can't help but thinking you're missing something. I've been working with maybe a thousand different computers and only encountered this issue maybe twice. One was an MSI board that refused to boot from W7's bootsector and one was a very old laptop, no name, that refused to boot from anything but floppy. Even on that one PLOP did the trick. On some BIOSes the USB stick will be considered as a hard drive. In that case you're expected to choose boot from HDD, not from USB. I suggest you give your USB some easily recognizable name, like say XANTIPPA, else it may turn up like HX35GF76 which may look quite similar to the name of your HDD. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that Puppy Linux live CDs or DVDs emulate floppies bootwise speaking.
I think I'll just use an IDE DVDROM for the moment, when it's needed. Thanks again, for your help and for your time.