IDE Controller Card

[Ayman Altounji]

I have just installed a Maxtor Ultra DMA 100 and when I have the drive attached to the controller card the boot process finds the IDE card and loads the bios...then the onboard scsi loads... then the system locks up and all I get is a blinking cursor. When I disconnect the drive the bios on the controller card does not load and the system boots as it should. Do you have any suggestions as to how to set the bios to boot to the inboard scsi hard drive.

Thank

Mike

[Ayman Altounji]

Since there is no IDE controller of any kind in a Proliant 1500... what controller are you using? We do not support IDE hard disks in these systems.

[Ayman Altounji]

I installed a pci controller card to go with an 80 gig hd that I purchased. When I boot the machine the system loads the pci controller card bios then the onboard scsi bios...after which the system locks up. What I need to know is how to make the bios boot to the oem scsi hard drive and not the ide controller which is being recognized by the bios as another scsi card.

[Ayman Altounji]

There is no way to do this... The system has no choice in the matter when you use an IDE controller that has it's own BIOS. The system is not in control of which controller boots then.

[Ayman Altounji]

To further elaborate on why this wont work, since the proliant servers do not support DIE, they also do not support the standard Int13 boos calls and interception that is normally handled by the DIE controller.

The proliant servers are SCSI based, while some have an DIE controller for CAROM access ONLY, they do not use the same Int13 signals to access the boot controller. The Maxtor card is operating under the assumption that there is the Int13 calls being made, that it is then expecting to intercept by way of its installed device bios. Also note, that the bios will only install if there are accessible devices attached to it.

What is happening is the Maxtor bios is hosing the system, hence the system lockups.

Get a Smart2/E, Smart2/P Smart2SL, smart2DH, or any other PCI based array controller and use it in conjuncture with the pluggable drive cage that is part of the server chassis. If you look around a little, you can find controllers and drives that are quite reasonably priced. By using an array controller, you can take several (up to 5 internally, an 7 externally (depending on the array controller) to create a virtual drive (raid volume) using several drives, that greatly exceeds the 80GB EIDE drive you purchased, and the system will see it as one drive letter.

What could be better?

I am here to serve,

Todd Hayward MCSE, ASE

[Ayman Altounji]

Damn it! I hate the the compaq spell checker screws up what would otherwise be a good post. IDE becomes DIE. Bios become Boos.

C'mon, get it together guys! Your tools make me look like a moron.

lordcompaq

[Ayman Altounji]

I have a ProLiant 2500 and installed the Maxtor ATA-100 card. I am running Win2000 server. My system boots to a SCSI interface. To use the AT 100 card I went into the machine config (F10) and disabled the controller BOOS for that specific controller. I can see the drives and have made them part of a volume set. I have also updated my drivers via smart start and there has been no problem. The only drawback I can see is when your your system con fig gets rebuild or updated it may enable the drives. This should be checked before booting to avoid any problems with program references/volume sets etc.

[Ayman Altounji]

Spell check strikes again, BOOS should be BIOS

[Ayman Altounji]

Why do you need IDE on a pure SCSI system?
You'll win on price but loose on performance.
My guess that you have a free proliant 1500. You can also have a Pentium based Pc for free and install 80GB HDD onto it.
it is not justifiable to make unsupported changes onto the system.

ustek@hotmail.com

[Ayman Altounji]

Allend,
how did you get this to work ?Im not sure what you mean by disabling the controller in the BIOS. Once you went to f10, did you disable to PCI IDE controller or did you disable to SCSI Controller?
If you are disabling the ide controller, how does the OS still see it?

Thanks

[Greg Smith_9]

Install the card into the PCI slot without the drives attached to it (I put it as far away from the SmartArray Controller as I could - Slot 1). Press to get into the BIOS setup. Disable the new PCI IDE controller by cursoring down to it and pressing enter on and down arrow to . Save and turn off. Install the drives on the new controller and reboot. When Windows 2000 comes up it will find it!!! Being disabled in BIOS does not mean disabling it in Windows. I just installed a SIIG Ultra ATA 133 card in a Proliant 2500 with a Western Digital 250 gig drive this way. Still boots on the SmartArray controller and has lots of cheap slow storage.