Interesting SATA behaviour

[Socaltom]

Background,
I've had a Pogo-pro box that I've been using for about a year. I wanted a back up box, and found a cheap one $15 on amazon, so I got it. I've been trying to get the direct SATA boot working, but no luck, so I went ahead and ran Warheads script and it boots from USB as expected. Since I use multiple drives, I went to get it to boot from SATA and it doesn't so I've tried a few experiments. I'll post the results below to see if you can make any sense of it.

I hooked up a 2.5 inch SATA drive I had left over and ghetto rigged it to the sata port ( SATA cable direct to Pogo port as would be done in a PC) and used power from a SATA to USB external housing I've got laying around. With this method I can't tell if the drive is accessed, but the LED on the pogo never comes on or flashes. The system never gets and IP address. ( this drive boots fine on a USB connection

Drive 2, a 2 TB Seagate drive in a Rosewill eSATA/USB housing ( V2). This drive boots fine with the USB connection. I connect is via eSATA cable to a Sata to eSATA adapter hooked to the pogo plug. The drive is accessed several times during the boot sequence, however the Pogo led never blinks or anything. ( when booting from USB, I get green flashing then solid green).

Drive 3, a 1 TB Seagate drive in a Rosewill eSata/USB housing ( probably a V1). This is the known good drive from my working box. When attached to the new box, the green LED flashes during the boot process, the drive is accessed and the system boots as expected.

If I put drive 3, the known good drive in the V2 housing, it also boots fine
If I hook up drive 3 with my "ghetto rig" it boots fine.

So clearly there is something missing from the other two drives to make them Sata boot compatible.

I did a little digging and found that the "good" drive had a dos compatible partition table, so I reformated drive 1 with a dos compatible table and guess what? it boots from Sata with my ghetto rig.

I suggest that this note be added to the instructions for those wishing to use the Sata port for booting.
Perhaps it was in the original instructions, which I can no longer find.
Tom

[WarheadsSE]

The original instructions are on the first post of the howto. Also: added.