Build Your Own SATA Hard Drive Switch 131
Mikey Win writes "ExtremeTech shows us a cool hardware hack that allows multiple operating system to boot without dealing with any tedious BIOS setup changes. How? By building your own SATA hard drive switch. The result? You can expect a longer hard drive life span, power supply load reduction, and partitions protected from becoming overwritten or corrupted."
Signal But no Power == BAD? (Score:2, Interesting)
Something tells me this is probably not a good idea.
Having a signal connected to the hard drive, and no power applied, at least in a traditional TTL or CMOS circuit, is not a good idea.
Since SATA is based on LVDS, this might not suffer from the typical CMOS or TTL problems, but I would investigate it a bit further.
Intelligent Switch Would be Better (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How is this a SATA switch? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sata Hub (but not a switch)-> http://www.cooldrives.com/sahub5muussi.html [cooldrives.com]
Re:If I need to access both drives from either OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How is this a SATA switch? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've helped to guide a bunch of SATA boards from prototype to product. From personal experience, I can tell you that a switch put together "half-decently" is very likely to result in unreliable SATA communication.
Re:Grub (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know if this works with grub, but it worked with lilo when I tried.
1.Install the linux bootloader to the first sector of the linux partition. /dev/hda6 is your linux partition.
2.Export that sector to file (dd if=/dev/hda6 of=linux.bin bs=512 count=1) where
3.Copy the linux.bin file to your Windows C: drive.
4.Open your C:\boot.ini file and add C:\linux.bin="Linux" after the last line.
You can now use Windows bootloader to choose between Windows and Linux.