DL360 - boot from IDE hard drive?

[Joel Whitehouse]

I attached an IDE HD to the onboard IDE controller of my DL360 G1.

When I boot win2k off the RAID, I can see the IDE drive and copy files to it. I can also install an OS (linux, win2k) to it from a CD.

However, even when I detach the RAID drives, I can't get the DL360 to boot an OS from the IDE drive. It will boot from the floppy, the CDROM and RAID, but not my IDE hard drive.

I need to boot from an IDE drive to use an OS that doesn't have native RAID support. How can I alter the boot sequence?

[e4services · Accepted solution]

Well, this is a multi-tiered problem.
First the servers IDE controller isn't designed to handle an IDE drive (there for the CD) and therefore I think no structure was put in place to put it in the Boot Strap.
Secondly, you would have to be able to tell the SCSI controller BIOS to NOT put itself in the boot strap, for it loads its BIOS after POST and will step over any onboard boot device, unless you can stop it from doing so.
We have had luck installing a PCI card IDE controller with a controllable BIOS to perform such an action. For your case you could attempt to, instead of detaching the drive, to go into the BIOS and disable the controller and see if the onboard IDE is even allowed in the boot strap.