Anna

"Colin Barnhorst" <c.barnhorst@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8196115D-8137-4DB2-A2FD-E5D62D9B53BD@xxxxxx
Jeff & Colin:
Notebooks equipped with an eSATA port are indeed a rare commodity. To the
best of my knowledge ASUS is the only major player that has released a few
models with an eSATA port. I'm not aware of Acer, Dell, Gateway, Compaq,
Sony, etc. having *any* models with an eSATA port. If they're out there,
they're few & far between, that's for sure. More's the pity, of course.

Some time ago I had occasion to work with one of the ASUS notebooks that
came equipped with an eSATA port (I can't recall the model #) and we were
able to boot from that port with a SATA HDD that had been the recipient of
the cloned contents of the notebook's internal HDD. That was no surprise, of
course, since every eSATA port that we've worked with on various desktop PCs
have proven to be "bootable". (For that matter it really makes *no*
difference whether the port is a "normal" SATA one or an eSATA one). A
bootable external SATA HDD connected to either type of port will boot.
Obviously we're talking about motherboards that support SATA capability.

We have never been able to boot from a CardBus (a/k/a PCMCIA) equipped with
either a SATA or eSATA port. We've concluded that it's just not a bootable
device.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we're still experimenting with various
ExpressCard devices to determine their potential "bootability". Every one
we've come across is equipped with an eSATA port and they're supposed to
provide boot capability. However, our experience has been mixed to date
although we were able to boot from a SATA HDD connected to an Addonics eSATA
ExpressCard.

Colin, if you've had any direct experience with an eSATA ExpressCard I'd
like to hear about it.
Anna