Proliant 1600 - Booting with SCSI & IDE drives...

[Thomas Sapiano]

Hi,

I recently picked up a 1600 off auction and am in the process of adding components to make it more useful for my purposes. The last of those additions was to purchase a 160GB ATA100 HDD and controller card (Promise TX2).

The problem is that when the IDE drive is attached, instead of booting from the Compaq RAID controller it tries to boot from the new drive. Naturally, when that happens I can't get into the F10 menu since the system partition is on the SCSI drives.

When I disconnect the IDE drive from the controller, it boots to the array fine. When I enter the F10 menu and change the boot order it claims to take the setting but as soon as I reconnect the IDE drive the IDE controller still asserts itself first. What I am thinking is happening is that when the drive is not attached the IDE controllers BIOS is not loading so it can't be taken out of the boot order - however I can't think of any way around this.

The machine did not come with the SmartStart CDs, so I can't install the system partition on the new drive to try and reconfigure from there. The WD disc copying utility does not recognise the SCSI controller, so I can't simply mirror the drives either. The promise controller does not have any configuration menu, so there is no way to configure the behavior of it's BIOS.

So, does anyone have any idea how to force the RAID controller to assert itself over the IDE controller? Worst-case scenario I could just buy the SmartStart CDs and use the IDE drive as the boot drive - however I'd rather run the OS off of the array and use the 160GB drive as a store for non-critical data.


A second problem that we've been having is that the machine periodically refuses to boot. The initial problem occured when the drive was first installed - at that point the machine wasn't booting at all. When the power switch was hit, it just switched on all of the system fans, switched on various LEDs on each board and turned on and then off the LED on the CD-ROM drive and then sat there not doing anything. No POST beep sequences, nothing shown on screen, no errors registered at all. After a little digging we figured out that this sometimes happened when the 'small signal cable' came loose. After reseating it, the machine booted up again and all was well.

Unfortunately, now the problem seems to have reappeared and reseating the cable doesn't seem to fix it. However, now this issue only crops up periodically. When the machine has been sitting for a while it never happens, it only seems to pop up when the machine has been rebooted several times durring a session. The only thing that I could think of is that it has something to do with heat issues, however the system doesn't provide any error message so I can't believe that this is a designed reaction to anything.

Thanks for any help that you guys can provide!

[Sunil Jerath]

Hello Thomas,
Is the system BIOS and firmware of array controller uptodate?? If not please do update them. As for as the taking over of the boot order by Promise controller I'm not sure why it is doing it. I have used an ordinary IDE controller by Maxtor and never had any problems whatsoever. What is the configuration of your server?? I mean one CPU Vs two CPUs, Smart Array controller, RAM etc etc. First and formost thing you want to do is to update the system roms and let the system be stablized with minimum configuration. Here is the system configuration which you can download and change the boot controller order without having the System partition installed locally.

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/13227.html

Regards,

[Fredo Lekkerkerker]

I have the same problem! I add an Promise PCI IDE controller and I can not boot. When I reinstall (it is a test server) then the Compaq partition is placed on the IDE disk as well as the Windows system partition. It looks like that the Promise PCI IDE Controller must be the primairy controller. You can not change it in the Compaq system configuration.

[Fredo Lekkerkerker]

I have a work around: Main problem is that the Compaq System setup does not give us the change to choose the controller order of the PCI IDE controller. But with the embedded IDE controller we can set the order. So I connect the IDE disk to the embedded controller and the Cd-rom (maybe you have an IDE backup device) to the PCI IDE controller. Now I can use the IDE disk only for data, I just tested it and it works :)

[David Greenwood_4]

I am running into exactly the same two problems. I have a ProLiant 1600 that I picked up second-hand this weekend. It currently has dual PII 350s, 256MB RAM, and I have installed five 4.3GB drives on the array controller which are set up as one RAID-5 logical drive. I have Red Hat 9 installed there.

I tore down my old server and installed some of its parts into the Proliant, including a FastTrak100 TX2 PCI card which controls mirrored sets of 200GB and 60GB IDE drives. I already had Red Hat 9 installed there, and it was booting from the 60GB mirror.

I want to use the RAID-5 array for the operating system, and the mirrored drives as mass storage. The problem is that I cannot figure out how to get the ProLiant to boot from the array when the FastTrak drives are installed. Even when the bootable 60GB drives are not hooked up, the system will still try to boot from the 200GB drive (which has never been a boot drive).

With Red Hat already installed on the 60GB IDE drive, the server will boot fine when they are installed, but this is not how I want the system configured. If I power down the IDE drives, the system will boot just fine from the array, but I won't have the storage capacity I need.

After installation of the Promise controller, I also ran into the reboot problem. When the server has been powered off for a little while (3-5 minutes), it boots without a hitch. But if I am trying a reboot from the OS, or if I have to power down due to system hang, the server does not always come back up. It will often hang without ever posting the "ProLiant" splash screen.

I have yet to find a definitive answer to this issue. I have used the system config utility to set the array controller as the first controller, but that makes no difference. The Promise controller BIOS has no option to disable bootability completely--as long as the IDE drives are connected and powered up, the server seems to consider them to be the only boot devices.

I would love some help. I really don't want to rebuild the old server!

David

[Buddy Greenshield]

I'm doing the same thing on a 1600 soon. On an ML-350 server, the IDE is always the first controller no matter what you do in the bios, however, if you disable the Promise fasttrak tx2 in the bios, windows 2000 will still recognize the card.
Have not tested with NT4 or Linux. My guess is that the same procedure will work on the 1600.

On the powerup problem, I have seen this as well and removing A/C power from the power supplies momentairly "resets" something and then it boots fine.

Buddy