I have a Dimension C521 that isn't booting from a drive plugged into the motherboard. All that happens is that I get strange characters on the screen. So then I tried booting from the DVD drive and the same thing happened.
I leapt to the conclusion that the drive controller on the motherboard had died.
My great plan was to buy a SATA card, connect the hard drive and DVD drive to that and I'd be good to go. So I found a card on Ebay that uses the VIA VT6421A chip and has two SATA ports, one IDE port and one eSATA port.
I plugged the card in, hooked up the drive, turned on the computer and . . . . nothing. I get told that there is no boot device attached. The BIOS reports that add in cards are to be the first boot device.
Should I be able to boot from an add in card? Did I buy the wrong card? Is my computer just dead and should become a boat anchor?
Thanks.