Booting off of external eSATA drive via eSATA II expresscard

[jlee87]

Hi, is this possible with the T500 BIOS?

I have done a lot of research on this and the consensus is that the BIOS must support the ability to recognize another SATA controller during boot up in order for this to work.

Prevoius threads on here have suggested that the T60 and T61 do not support this.  I have found threads on the internet that indicate that the older T43 supported this, various current Asus and HP notebooks, and Macbooks support this feature given the correct eSATA expresscard.

The end goal here is to run a dual boot with Windows 7 and ubuntu.

So... Is this possible with the T500 BIOS?  Thanks.

[jlee87]

Well I just got off the phone with lenovo tech support and they can't determine if it will work or not.  They would not escalate the issue because they said that they would not support a third party device that is in question (the expresscard), which I don't think is completely accurate since the Thinkpad BIOS MUST support this feature in order for it to work.  The agent suggested that I contact the expresscard manufactuarer instead.

If I call the expresscard manufactuarer, they'll tell me to contact the laptop manufactuarer to determine if the BIOS has support for this.  So really, both devices need to support this, both devices are in question, yet I can't get an answer out of Lenovo...

[fmyhr]

I too would like to be able to boot my T500 from an ExpressCard or CardBus eSATA adapter.

I have tried and have not been able to boot a T60 from an external drive connected to CardBus eSATA adapter. (Same drive booted when connected via USB.)

To the best of my knowledge, the ThinkPad BIOS does not support booting from expansion cards. I see no such options in  BIOS Setup, when selecting boot devices and order.

If you find out differently, please let us all know!

Thanks,

Frank

[jlee87]

The parts have been ordered... I'll post what I find out here.

I'm not too optomistic to be honest.

[jlee87]

So I did a pretty radical experiment to try to get this to work.  I documented the account on my blog

I basically tried to get access to the internal SATA port, I got something to work but its quite unstable and ultimately, it did not satisfy my initial goal.  I hope it helps others though.

Message Edited by jlee87 on 08-11-2009 06:49 AM