Weird problem booting from a PCI Raid card!

[Web Junkie]

Seeing as my mobo only has 1 IDE connector, i've put my optical drives on it and decided to use an A-Bit Hotrod Pro 100 Raid card as an IDE Controller for my HDD's as it doesn't support optical drives.

I can use my boot drive on the IDE card no problem, system boots up to XP. However, if I connect my other 2 HDD's as Master/Slave to the Secondary channel then I get Disk Boot Failure! No matter what I do, the system will only boot with 1 HDD connected to the card!

The BIOS on the mobo defaults to the IDE card as the first Hard Disk boot device (found as SCSI-0 HPT370/372) as there are no HDD's connected to the mobo. I can set a boot drive in the cards BIOS but this still won't allow booting with 2 or more HDD's connected?

Is this because it's a RAID card and if more than 1 drive is connected it expects it to be a RAID array? if so, does this mean I CANNOT get this to work with 3 separate HDD's. I have 2 x 120GB Seagate Baracudas and 1 x 60GB Hitachi Deskstar I want to use.

Any ideas please?

[regan1985]

is there not a opion to push f6 or f4 when its booting up to config the pci card?

[Web Junkie]

The card has an onboard BIOS and I get a 'press CTRL-H' option to enter the BIOS at system bootup. The problem is this card refuses to allow my boot drive to boot if ANY other drive is connected to the card at the same time, disconnect those drives and the boot drive can boot.

It is NOT being used as a RAID array, just as an IDE Controller, this may be why i'm having a problem. As I mentioned previously it may be looking at the additional drives to part of an array of the boot drive and failing if it's not, but that's just a guess.

[Wile E]

Have you checked to see if the card has any BIOS updates available? Might as well check for your mobo as well.

[Web Junkie]

Both mobo and Raid card have the latest BIOS, 0604 for the Crosshair mobo and 2.351 for the Raid card.

[Wile E]

I dunno, maybe try raiding the 2 120's?

[oily_17]

I dunno, maybe try raiding the 2 120's?

Yeah as Wile E said I would raid the two drives,or if you can disable the raid function in the card's bios to use it as separate ide channels,I would try that.

As there is more than one drive connected to the card it probably expects them to be in a raid configuration and that is why it wont boot.

[Web Junkie]

I don't think the RAID can be disabled, can't see any option in the cards BIOS :(

I don't want to use RAID at all, and besides, I don't have anything to backup 2 HDD's worth of data to if I did want to RAID them!

Looks like buying a SATA300 drive and making that my boot drive, then copy the data I need off the original boot disk and format it as a data drive and use it as extra storage on the RAID card.

[Web Junkie]

Well, being a smart alec, I downloaded the BIOS for a plain Rocket100 IDE Controller and flashed it into my RAID Controller (both use the HPT370A controller). This now shows just the drive list and no RAID setup when entering the BIOS for the card but I still get DISK BOOT FAILURE when I plug my boot disk into the Primary Master (jumpered as a master drive) and the 2 spare drives jumpered as Master/Slave into the Secondary channel??? :roll:

I just can't win with this card :laugh:

[Wile E]

Have you tried setting all drives to Cable Select? Maybe that would work better?

[ex_reven]

RAID the two 'cudas, then have your 60 gig drive and the DVD/CD Drive attached to the mobo with a single IDE cable. You can backup important stuff onto the 60 gig drive if need be.

Depends on how much data you have of course...if your a movie hoarder your screwed :roll:

[Web Junkie]

All drives are near bursting :)

If I connect 2 drives and go into the RAID config I can select JBOD mode, but not sure if this will delete data on the 2 drives if I go ahead and click 'create array'?

[cdawall]

JBOD shouldnt clear the drives but im not positive about it...

[Darknova]

You might want to try looking for an option called "boot from other device" in the BIOS and activating it.

[Web Junkie]

The BIOS on the mobo DOES let me boot from the card! JBOD will DELETE all data on the drive! I attached 2 x 40GB drives and set them up as JBOD and when I clicked 'create array' it asked if I wanted to delete the drives, so that's not going to work!

Right, something weird has been discovered. I've put my boot drive on the Primary channel of the card as a master then slaved another dirve to it and found if I set the SLAVE DRIVE as the boot drive in the card then I can boot from the boot drive? If set the boot drive as the boot drive in the card it gives DISK BOOT FAILURE? WTF? :mad:

But, attaching the 3rd drive, be it Master or Slave, on the Secondary channel gives DISK BOOT FAILURE too! No matter if I try each drive as the boot drive in the card? So I can now get 2 drives working but still not 3, this card is just taking the piss now :mad: :banghead:

[Jannu]

The BIOS on the mobo DOES let me boot from the card! JBOD will DELETE all data on the drive! I attached 2 x 40GB drives and set them up as JBOD and when I clicked 'create array' it asked if I wanted to delete the drives, so that's not going to work!

Right, something weird has been discovered. I've put my boot drive on the Primary channel of the card as a master then slaved another dirve to it and found if I set the SLAVE DRIVE as the boot drive in the card then I can boot from the boot drive? If set the boot drive as the boot drive in the card it gives DISK BOOT FAILURE? WTF? :mad:

But, attaching the 3rd drive, be it Master or Slave, on the Secondary channel gives DISK BOOT FAILURE too! No matter if I try each drive as the boot drive in the card? So I can now get 2 drives working but still not 3, this card is just taking the piss now :mad: :banghead:

Isn't there an option in the controllers BIOS to select boot device? There usually is..

[Wile E]

The BIOS on the mobo DOES let me boot from the card! JBOD will DELETE all data on the drive! I attached 2 x 40GB drives and set them up as JBOD and when I clicked 'create array' it asked if I wanted to delete the drives, so that's not going to work!

Right, something weird has been discovered. I've put my boot drive on the Primary channel of the card as a master then slaved another dirve to it and found if I set the SLAVE DRIVE as the boot drive in the card then I can boot from the boot drive? If set the boot drive as the boot drive in the card it gives DISK BOOT FAILURE? WTF? :mad:

But, attaching the 3rd drive, be it Master or Slave, on the Secondary channel gives DISK BOOT FAILURE too! No matter if I try each drive as the boot drive in the card? So I can now get 2 drives working but still not 3, this card is just taking the piss now :mad: :banghead:What about trying to set the drives to Cable Select?

[Beertintedgoggles]

I know this is probably blasphemous around here (I never do it myself and if I had to it'd be my last option), but have you tried emailing the manufacturer of the card and explaining the problem to them. The engineers that designed and programmed the card should prob know a little bit more about it than us here, unless someone reading this has the same exact card.

[Web Junkie]

Yup! E-mailed both A-Bit and High Point last week, so far zippo replies!

BUT! I have SOLVED THE ENIGMA!! :toast:

To attach 3 HDD's to this controller and be able to boot from the boot drive you have perform the following Voodoo:

1. Attach the boot drive to the Secondary Channel as a Master.
2. Attach the 2 data drives to the Primary Channel as Master/Slave.
3. Set the boot drive in the card to be the PRIMARY SLAVE drive.

When you've done all this Voodoo the system will magically boot into XP/Vista with all 3 HDD's listed and both DVD drives too!

Oh yes, I am GOD of "Boot your IDE drive from a PCI RAID Controller in Non-Raid mode when you have 3 HDD's attached" :laugh:

[cdawall]

lol thats amazing :roll:

[Web Junkie]

And people wonder why PC's cause so much frustration!