Can you configure the BIOS settings on GA-H61M-DS2 to boot a SATA III SSD Drive

[ngc1967]

Hi Everyone,

I have a PC with the GIGABYTE motherboard GA-H61M-DS2.

I have recently bought a SSD drive (Kingston Hyper X 240GB) purely to run the Windows 7 OS. Everything else will be stored on another hard drive in the PC.

The PC is fine booting up from the SSD drive when it is plugged into one of the SATA II connections on the motherboard, but the SSD drive can support SATA III and the motherboard only has SATA II connections.

I have just bought a cheap(ish) PCIe SATA III extension card that has two SATA III connections internally and two eSATA connections on the back. It is meant to be bootable but I can't get it to boot up the SSD drive directly.

The SATA III card (or the driver/controller) is an 'ASMEDIA 106x SATA Controller' and I can see it loaded up OK under the 'Device Manager' of the PC's Control Panel so it should be working OK.

I have tried googling the booting problem from an extension card and various comments refer to going into the Gigabyte motherboard's BIOS setting and selecting AHCI or changing the boot setting to 'Boot from card'.

I have looked at all these settings and I can't find anything that says 'Boot from card'. I can find a setting under the Peripherals - SATA Mode Selection to change the TAB from IDE to AHCI but after I do that, I don't know what to do next?

Does anyone know about this motherboard and if I can actually configure it to boot up from the SSD drive when it is plugged directly into the PCIe SATA III card? If so what do I need to do?

[dmdilks]

Check to see if you have a add-on card in Hard Disk Boot Priority. If you don't have one your board doesn't support them to boot from. Plus you are not going see really any performance boost from the card.

There is nothing in your boot option.

First/Second/Third Boot Device
Specifies the boot order from the available devices. Use the up or down arrow key to select a device and
press <Enter> to accept. Options are: Hard Disk, CDROM, USB-FDD, USB-ZIP, USB-CDROM, USBHDD,
Legacy LAN, Disabled.

[ngc1967]

Thank you dmdilks for replying.

I looked over all the main menus in the BIOS setup and I couldn't find anything that referred to 'add-on cards' at all. In fact I couldn't even see a section that said 'Hard Disk Boot Priority'. The closet I got was under the section 'BIOS Features' which had the option tab 'Boot Option Priorities' and under that you could choose the boot order but there was nothing about add-on cards.

I will have another look tonight when I get home from work but it may be the case of the motherboard not being able to support bootable expansion cards. (Like you also said, I may not even see any noticeable performance boost).

[dmdilks]

 "Hard Disk Boot Priority" It should be in Advanced BIOS Features right at the top of the page.

[ngc1967]

"Hard Disk Boot Priority" It should be in Advanced BIOS Features right at the top of the page.

Thanks for the tip. I have looked again and my motherboard doesn't seem to have the 'Advanced' option. There is the standard 'BIOS Features' tab at the top and under that there are the drive boot options but they only show the drives connected to the motherboard (not to the SATA III card).

I have now connected the SSD straight to the SATA II port on the motherboard and from Power on it is taking 50 seconds to boot up (with a freshly formatted SSD and Windows 7). I am OK with that and as you said earlier, it probably won't make too much of a preformance difference not being SATA III (10-15 seconds?). I have also changed the desktop, downloads and music locations etc. to another drive so that the SSD won't get clogged up and slow down over time.