ASRock 990FX Ext 4 MB owners; questions

[videobruce]

Sorry I couldn't come up with a better title, but it would of been too long.

Situation: New build;
ASRock 990FX Ext 4 MB,
Will be running Win7,
Two drives transfered over from nForce 570 MB as is,
New SSD & 1TB HDD, neither formatted,
All drives SATA,
MB is set for AHCI for all ports.

Questions;
1. Can individual SATA ports be disabled?
2. In the UEFI interface (BIOS) under Storage, there is a external eSATA port option to enabler or disable the SATA ESP for each of the six SATA ports. What is that suppose to mean?
3. I enabled the "AMD AHCI BIOS ROM" option, but I see no difference during boot.?
4. Is there the ability to use a conventional old school BIOS?

Now here is the kicker;
When I connect either to ports 7 or 8 which uses a Marvell controller, both have been able to boot into XP by themselves. I though this was impossible unless you radically modify them to do so. But when I switch either over to ports 1-6, the BIOS sees them, but both produce a BSOD as expected (until now on the other controller). How can this happen??

 

[RGone]

1. Do not have that mobo and likely will never have one.

2. Few coming thru these forums ever report having such board, most bought the cheap0 970 chipset boards.

3. So since you have had no response for a while now, will try to give a few answers to your questions from general use experience.

Questions;
1. Can individual SATA ports be disabled? = Normally good boards today allow disabling unused sata ports.

2. In the UEFI interface (BIOS) under Storage, there is a external eSATA port option to enabler or disable the SATA ESP for each of the six SATA ports. What is that suppose to mean? = Sata ESP has to do with external drives/hotswap support, just leave that as default or disabled. I have it set to Disabled on my Asus CHV.

3. I enabled the "AMD AHCI BIOS ROM" option, but I see no difference during boot.? = Not sure what you expected to see with AHCI enabled.

4. Is there the ability to use a conventional old school BIOS? = Not likely since the newer size hard drives have made it a necessity to use an EFI boot to utilize the bigger drives for the average consumer. I also think M$ made it nearly mandatory to have EFI for Win 8 compatibility. So there generally will be no old style bioses available for the mobos.

When I connect either to ports 7 or 8 which uses a Marvell controller, both have been able to boot into XP by themselves. = Not having the board and seeing the options for use of the Marvel controller it is not easy to actually answer that question. Perhaps only to guess at an answer. The Marvel controller is not setting AHCI so the Win XP drives likely set to IDE or Legacy IDE are bootable on the Marvel ports. Otherwise any other answer is also just a guess. I see from your list of new pieces that you have a new SSD to boot from and a 1TB plattered hard drive for storage. I expect you will not keep other older drives in the system anyway so their ability to boot on Marvel sata is likely a mute point.