Booting CF-18K from external USB SATA HDD

I'm trying to get my CF-18K (Mk.4) to boot from an external HDD. The HDD is a USB serial ATA (SATA) enclosure with a Seagate ST940814AS drive. NOTE there is no internal HDD or caddy, only this external USB-powered SATA HDD.

The BIOS has an option for USB HDD and it sees the HDD when attached. But after loading WinXP on the HDD, it goes into a mup.sys BSOD reboot loop. Safe mode no help.

The OEM Restore CDs won't load directly onto the external drive, they complain there is no fixed drive available (true). So I tried several other ways:
- cloned an image of a working internal HDD to the external HDD,
- made a new image from the OEM disks stopping at the reboot point, then clone onto the external HDD,
- loaded a non-OEM (Dell) version of WinXP directly onto the external HDD.

Tried each USB port -- same results. HDD starts to load Windows then gets a blue screen and reboots. Safe mode shows this happens after loading mup.sys. BSOD message is typically non-descript saying an error occurred and Windows has stopped blah blah blah ...

Has anyone successfully booted from external SATA? Any suggestions what to try next?

 

So .....

60 folks read this the last 2 days and Nobody Knows How To Boot From a SATA Drive ???

Any suggestions on what to try?

 

No clue. I used a restore disc to restore to a USB drive connected to a CF-19. It appeared to restore but, wouldn't boot. I forget any error messages.

Glen

 

I would suggest that windows is loading standard HDD controller drivers and Blue screening, It's a long shot, but if you could find the actual drivers that need to be loaded to drive the usb hub and the sata/usb adapter, and install them using F8 (or is it F6?) during the install.
My desktop was doing exactly the same thing when I enabled AHCI without the correct drivers.

Just a thought.

Fraser

 

The issue here is not the ability to boot from the external hard drive. It is an issue of Windows crashing because the hardware that was present at the time of install is different than the current configuration of using the USB drive as the primary adapter. This may work only if you install Windows to the external hard drive while it is installed on the CF-18.

 

Actually I did try that. The OEM disks would not load to the USB drive, but a Dell Windows disk did load directly to the USB HDD. However, when it came time to reboot to finish the Windows installation, it did the same thing - BSOD.

Thanks for the suggestions, please keep them coming and I'll keep trying.

This cheap USB SATA caddy fits inside the CF-18 and CF-29 chassis with room for padding. If I can get it to boot right this device could be wired internally as a substitute for the overpriced OEM caddies.

BTW the SATA chipset is MA6116

 

Okay then I suspect that when you are installing windows and it creates the HAL it makes note of the internal IDE controller but at this point it does not care that there isn't a drive attached and tags it as good. Then When you reboot and it does a hardware check it sees the IDE controller as innaccesible and causes the BSOD. I suspect that the error you are getting is "Inaccessible Mass Storage controller". Not sure how you would get around this without having a hard drive connected to the IDE controller as this would defeat your purpose of doing away with the expensive caddy/cable.

 

I tried leaving in the internal HDD as well as the external USB SATA, but putting the external HDD first in the BIOS boot order. It should be able to see a valid internal HDD, then try booting from the external SATA. But no joy with that setup either.