ml310e gen8 - How do I use SATA Port 6 as the boot drive with the hot-swap cage in AHCI mode?

[Wolfe_MSL]

I have a Proliant ML310e Gen8 server which I plan to use as a fileserver with ZFS.  For ZFS purposes the hot-swap cage is set to AHCI mode instead of RAID.  My OS drive is installed on the spare motherboard SATA port (port 6).

The BIOS only offers a single "Boot from hard drive" option, which appears to always look for a drive by order of SATA ID.  This means the server insists on attempting to boot from the drives in the hot-swap cage, which results in boot errors (there is no MBR on these drives, intentionally).

How do I reconfigure the BIOS to use the drive on SATA port 6 as the primary boot device?

[Torsten.]

Not sure if this works on the B120i, but it works with other smart arrays ...

Set the controller to RAID mode (create a RAID0 per drive for your purposes), go into ACU and set the boot drive.

[Wolfe_MSL]

Thanks for the suggestion Torsten, I'll try it next time I can offline the server.  After making the change I assume I could switch back to AHCI?

It occurred to me that as a workaround I could also load GRUB to a USB stick, boot to USB then let GRUB boot the actual OS disk.

[Torsten.]

I would try this with 1 or 2 new disks, I assume switching to RAID may corrupt the data on the disks ...