Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

haravikk

macrumors 65832
Original poster
May 1, 2005
1,504
26
Hi there,

I got one of those eSATA back-plates for my Mac Pro so I could make use of the two spare internal SATA connections hidden behind the front-fan (do the new Mac Pros have them?).

I was hoping I'd be able to boot up Windows from the drive I connected to the first eSATA port ("Bay 5"), however it doesn't seem to want to, it'll boot just fine if I put it inside my Mac in place of an internal drive, but I don't want to keep it that way as I have all four bays occupied and striped together using software RAID. Strangely though I can boot up other things from the drive, such as rEFIt (EFI boot-manager).

So I'm thinking therefore it must be an issue with the Windows installation, because it's just about the stupidest OS for starting up from anything but the first internal drive in a computer, I mean seriously, I've yet to find a drive I can't boot OS X from. But I'm wondering if anyone knows if it's possible to somehow configure Windows so it will boot? I've tried getting it to run from a USB drive before and had no luck with that either. I have Windows XP and the Windows 7 beta currently, I was hoping to continue using Windows 7 but if there's no solution for that yet then I can use XP just as happily.

Thanks!
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.