Booting Windows off the 2 extra sata ports

[FranzyPants]

I have a 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 and I'm working on doing a 4 drive raid 0 set up for my Mac Pro. Currently, I have a drive in bay 4 for Windows 7. I got a sata cable and a molex to sata power adaptor to try using one of the extra sata ports under the front fan for a Windows 7 drive. I was going to get a 5.25 to 3.5 bay adaptor to run the hard drive in my empty dvd drive bay.

However, after doing a test with a spare hard drive, it seems Windows will not recognize the drive running off of the sata ports under the front fan. It works fine under OS X as a backup drive, but windows doesn't show the drive in the installer for the os.

Is this a hardware limitation? Can I only use the 4 main drive bay's sata ports as boot drives? Or is there a way to boot off of the auxiliary sata ports?

 

[slughead]

There's no hardware limitation, it has to do with the drivers in Windows.

Do a search on this forum for AHCI drivers. I'm not entirely sure you'll be able to boot off of the ODD port with your model of MP (newer models supposedly fixed this issue), but maybe you'll be able to use the drive once booted into windows.

 

[PJALM]

Sorry but no, Windows can not boot off the extra 2 Sata ports. This is simply do to the IDE emulation from the EFI. There are ways to get Windows to use the extra 2 Sata ports but not boot from them.

Also, if you do setup a OS X Raid, make sure to not install the Bootcamp drivers in Windows, it will install the Apple HFS driver which will cause BSODs if a Raid is present.

 

[ActionableMango]

There is a thread here about doing this. You will need to be dedicated. It is not for the faint of heart.

 

[PJALM]

Will it actually allow you to boot off the extra ports? I have tried several of these guides and only managed to get Windows 7 to recognize the extra ports and use them for Optical drives or HDDs but never managed to boot off them.

 

[CaptainChunk]

Will it actually allow you to boot off the extra ports? I have tried several of these guides and only managed to get Windows 7 to recognize the extra ports and use them for Optical drives or HDDs but never managed to boot off them.

It's tricky to do and I'm in the same boat - never figured getting the SATA ports to boot (on both ODD and HDD) and gave up. But my primary goal was to enable my Blu-ray drive in Windows, so in that regard, I was successful. It disables my stock IDE SuperDrive though (no big deal, really).

 

[ORTOX]

I had tried doing this briefly, but decided it was pointless. I just installed my Windows installation hard drive in the 4th primary hard drive bay and my storage drives in 2 and 3. The #1 primary hard drive bay is for my time machine backup and I just use the extra SATA ports for my Mac OS install running in RAID.