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Hello,
A couple of years ago I bought a couple of Z68 ITX motherboards which (as it turned out) they're some of the lowest quality motherboards I've ever owned. With hardly any experimentation from my part one failed (now I'm on its replacement) and the other one cannot cold boot (it is rebooting a couple of times before actually booting). Anyhow I'm not here to talk about motherboards but about disks or to be more precise about how I can boot into one even though it doesn't appear to be bootable.
To make a long story short one of the above motherboards have -also- a faulty msata port. It "sees" the disk but cannot boot from it. In other words I can use the msata disk as a secondary disk (installing programs, moving files, etc) no problem, and in fact I do so for quite some time, but whenever I install windows on it it says "some files are missing" in each boot sequence.
My understanding is that Windows create an 100 mb partition for just that reason (boot purposes) but somehow it got messed up by the ailing motherboard/controller. My question is rather simple: Can I have that partition somewhere externally, yet (have) the windows folder as well as my program files into my msata disk?
I'm asking this because I decided that this machine would move into an even smaller case (cusom made) where even an 2.5'' disk is way too big so I rather "run" my msata disk alone. A small external usb key would not be a problem (just for the boot sequence) either, but is that possible? i.e. use a different "disk" for the boot sequence, and a different one (my msata) as the "OS drive".
And before anyone asks, yes my msata module is quite alright, it can actually boot in any other motherboard that I have tried it, the problem is clearly with *this* controller (my drive even booted to my -other- identical Z68 itx board).
To make a looong story short: Can I use one drive as a boot drive and another as an OS drive?
Thank you.
A couple of years ago I bought a couple of Z68 ITX motherboards which (as it turned out) they're some of the lowest quality motherboards I've ever owned. With hardly any experimentation from my part one failed (now I'm on its replacement) and the other one cannot cold boot (it is rebooting a couple of times before actually booting). Anyhow I'm not here to talk about motherboards but about disks or to be more precise about how I can boot into one even though it doesn't appear to be bootable.
To make a long story short one of the above motherboards have -also- a faulty msata port. It "sees" the disk but cannot boot from it. In other words I can use the msata disk as a secondary disk (installing programs, moving files, etc) no problem, and in fact I do so for quite some time, but whenever I install windows on it it says "some files are missing" in each boot sequence.
My understanding is that Windows create an 100 mb partition for just that reason (boot purposes) but somehow it got messed up by the ailing motherboard/controller. My question is rather simple: Can I have that partition somewhere externally, yet (have) the windows folder as well as my program files into my msata disk?
I'm asking this because I decided that this machine would move into an even smaller case (cusom made) where even an 2.5'' disk is way too big so I rather "run" my msata disk alone. A small external usb key would not be a problem (just for the boot sequence) either, but is that possible? i.e. use a different "disk" for the boot sequence, and a different one (my msata) as the "OS drive".
And before anyone asks, yes my msata module is quite alright, it can actually boot in any other motherboard that I have tried it, the problem is clearly with *this* controller (my drive even booted to my -other- identical Z68 itx board).
To make a looong story short: Can I use one drive as a boot drive and another as an OS drive?
Thank you.
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