Booting from hard drive attached to PCI

[Joe S]

I would like to ask some questions of the hard drive specialists here.

----

I have a PC based on an old SV266A motherboard by Syntax running a
socket-A processor and WinXP.

The mobo supports only PATA.
The PC has 2 PCI adapter cards: one for PATA and the other for SATA.

The chips in the adpter cards are:
Silicon Image SiI 0680 Ultra-ATA/133 Medley RAID
Silicon Image SiI 3512 SATARaid

The PATA card has a BIOS which can be flashed but the SATA card does
not.

 

[Paul]

I would like to ask some questions of the hard drive specialists here.

----

I have a PC based on an old SV266A motherboard by Syntax running a
socket-A processor and WinXP.

The mobo supports only PATA.
The PC has 2 PCI adapter cards: one for PATA and the other for SATA.

The chips in the adpter cards are:
Silicon Image SiI 0680 Ultra-ATA/133 Medley RAID
Silicon Image SiI 3512 SATARaid

The PATA card has a BIOS which can be flashed but the SATA card does
not.

----

(1) Can I boot off a SATA drive attached to the adapter?

(2) Can I boot off a PATA drive attached to the adapter.

One of the jobs of the BIOS chip that is present on the adapter card,
is support for INT 0x13. That is the software interrupt that provides
read/write access to a disk, during boot at POST.

http://www.dewassoc.com/support/bios/bios_interrupt_13h_extensions.htm

The BIOS chip on the motherboard, is modular. It has a main body of
code, that supports the major chipset components. It can also have a
BIOS module for each additional chip added to the motherboard. For
example, if there was a RAID chip on the motherboard, then a RAID
BIOS module can be added to the BIOS image stored in the motherboard
flash chip.

Say, for example, you had a SIL3112 on a motherboard. The motherboard
BIOS had a SIL3112 module embedded in it. If you added a PCI card
with a SIL3112 on it, it is just possible that the same BIOS code
could control and access both chips. As another example, on SCSI cards,
I believe it is possible for the BIOS on one card, to be used
to control more than one card of the same brand (Adaptec SCSI).

In the case of your SIL3512, the motherboard is not likely to have
a BIOS module for it. If the card has no flash chip whatsoever, then
there is no place to store the INT 0x13 extension code. The BIOS will
not know what to do with the SIL3512 during POST, and would ignore
it in a practical sense.

Cards that are missing a BIOS module, can still be used for data disks.
A driver installed in the OS, allows the OS to access the disks on the
controller, once the OS has finished booting. So cards without a BIOS
are not a total loss. You just can't boot from them.

Similarly, on some server motherboards, there are situations where
not all the BIOS add-in modules can be loaded at POST. There is insufficient
low memory for all of them, in some cases. If so-equipped, it is possible
to disable the BIOS on some of the add-in cards, so that only the
cards that are candidates as boot devices, have their BIOS loaded.
Or, by changing the slots the cards sit in, and knowing the preferred
order the BIOS modules load in, it is possible to put the cards you
want to "lose" at the BIOS loading game, lower down on the loading
priority list.

I don't own a SIL0680 (formerly known as CMD 0680 - the chip is quite
old, and SIL acquired it and possibly made tiny changes to it). I'll
leave it to a previous poster to describe it. See post #11 in this
thread. I'd sooner use a Promise Ultra133 card, than try the SIL 0680.
I don't know the technical details, as to why it doesn't play nice. Some
people seem to have no complaints. And not everybody likes Promise
cards either - especially if you try to use more than one card. Googling a
card's make/model or the major chip on it, is a good idea no matter what
you want to buy:

http://groups.google.ca/group/micro..._frm/thread/75ea08ee67d4116f/474a127097f38b95

Paul

 

[Synapse Syndrome]

I would like to ask some questions of the hard drive specialists here.

----

I have a PC based on an old SV266A motherboard by Syntax running a
socket-A processor and WinXP.

The mobo supports only PATA.
The PC has 2 PCI adapter cards: one for PATA and the other for SATA.

The chips in the adpter cards are:
Silicon Image SiI 0680 Ultra-ATA/133 Medley RAID
Silicon Image SiI 3512 SATARaid

The PATA card has a BIOS which can be flashed but the SATA card does
not.

----

(1) Can I boot off a SATA drive attached to the adapter?

(2) Can I boot off a PATA drive attached to the adapter.

I've actually got both those same cards in my server.

One of the drives connected to the SiI 0680 is the OS drive and boots fine
from it. The SiI 3512 is only used for a mobile rack, and I have never
attempted to boot from it.

ss.

 

[Johannes Andersen]

I would like to ask some questions of the hard drive specialists here.

----

I have a PC based on an old SV266A motherboard by Syntax running a
socket-A processor and WinXP.

The mobo supports only PATA.
The PC has 2 PCI adapter cards: one for PATA and the other for SATA.

The chips in the adpter cards are:
Silicon Image SiI 0680 Ultra-ATA/133 Medley RAID
Silicon Image SiI 3512 SATARaid

The PATA card has a BIOS which can be flashed but the SATA card does
not.

----

(1) Can I boot off a SATA drive attached to the adapter?

(2) Can I boot off a PATA drive attached to the adapter.

I've used a a PCI card for connecting boot drive in two cases. Mainly
for the convenience of getting extra sockets. The trick is to tell BIOS
to boot from SCSI when selecting "Boot from...".

I know..., it isn't SCSI, but it tells the motherboard to look for a boot
device on the PCI bus instead of the IDE ports.

 

[Mike Walsh]

Some system BIOSs will allow you to specify which SCSI adapter to boot with. Most will boot from only the first SCSI adapter that loads its BIOS. A real SCSI adapter will allow you to disable its BIOS. The ATA cards I have seen that emulate SCSI don't allow you to disable the BIOS; you most change PCI card slots to change which card will be used to boot.

 

[johannes]

Some system BIOSs will allow you to specify which SCSI adapter to boot with. Most will boot from only the first SCSI adapter that loads its BIOS. A real SCSI adapter will allow you to disable its BIOS. The ATA cards I have seen that emulate SCSI don't allow you to disable the BIOS; you most change PCI card slots to change which card will be used to boot.

AFAIK, it is much simpler. It is not a SCSI emulation, it is just that the
BIOS option 'Boot from SCSI' makes the motherboard look for the boot device
on the PCI BUS, where is expects to find an alternative device, but not
necessarily a SCSI. The device type SCSI/PATA/SATA has really nothing to do
with PCI, it comes in much later by the type of disc connector card you plug
into the PCI.

 

[kony]

I would like to ask some questions of the hard drive specialists here.

----

I have a PC based on an old SV266A motherboard by Syntax running a
socket-A processor and WinXP.

The mobo supports only PATA.
The PC has 2 PCI adapter cards: one for PATA and the other for SATA.

The chips in the adpter cards are:
Silicon Image SiI 0680 Ultra-ATA/133 Medley RAID
Silicon Image SiI 3512 SATARaid

The PATA card has a BIOS which can be flashed but the SATA card does
not.

----

(1) Can I boot off a SATA drive attached to the adapter?

(2) Can I boot off a PATA drive attached to the adapter.

Unless the motherboard bios has a severe bug, yes you should
be able to boot from either, if you only had one of the two
cards installed.

If you have both cards installed, things become more
interesting because some boards will "see" both of them and
allow choosing but others will only allow the first seen.
This is even true with two of the exact same controller card
installed.

What exactly do you mean by "The PATA card has a BIOS which
can be flashed but the SATA card does not."? That statement
could be taken two ways. Does it mean the SATA card has no
bios EEPROM on it, or merely that you have no bios file
available you could flash to it, and further, why would you
mention whether you can flash the bios since this is not
necessarily relevant to your question?

Most SiI3512 cards (or discrete chips integrated onto a
motherboard) should have a bios. That bios could be on an
EEPROM or PROM on the card, or a module in the motherboard
bios if it's a SiI3512 chip soldered to the motherboard.

Also keep in mind that you can't move a WinNT/2K/XP/Vista(?)
drive to either of these controllers without some changes to
the OS so it loads the driver and knows to look on this
alternate controller. Normally the OS is installed to the
drive directly on the card and you press F5 during the
installation to supply the card driver.

 

[~misfit~]

Unless the motherboard bios has a severe bug, yes you should
be able to boot from either, if you only had one of the two
cards installed.

If you have both cards installed, things become more
interesting because some boards will "see" both of them and
allow choosing but others will only allow the first seen.
This is even true with two of the exact same controller card
installed.

I have found that, with more than one controller board, the mobo BIOS will
'look' at each in turn until it finds a bootable HDD/partition. IME, as long
as there's only one bootable drive attached to the PCI cards it seems to
work. (I have fairly limited experience with this though)

What exactly do you mean by "The PATA card has a BIOS which
can be flashed but the SATA card does not."? That statement
could be taken two ways. Does it mean the SATA card has no
bios EEPROM on it, or merely that you have no bios file
available you could flash to it, and further, why would you
mention whether you can flash the bios since this is not
necessarily relevant to your question?

Most SiI3512 cards (or discrete chips integrated onto a
motherboard) should have a bios. That bios could be on an
EEPROM or PROM on the card, or a module in the motherboard
bios if it's a SiI3512 chip soldered to the motherboard.

Also keep in mind that you can't move a WinNT/2K/XP/Vista(?)
drive to either of these controllers without some changes to
the OS so it loads the driver and knows to look on this
alternate controller. Normally the OS is installed to the
drive directly on the card and you press F5 during the
installation to supply the card driver.

Yeah, I thought that too. However, recently I had occasion to install a VIA
VT6421 RAID PCI card (2 x SATA + 1 x dual-fifo PATA connectors) and then
Ghost a failing (Samsung) 80GB ATA100 HDD (10GB boot partition, XP Pro,
attached to mobo IDE) to a (Seagate) 200GB SATA HDD on the controller card.

When I removed the 80GB HDD and set the BIOS to boot from "SCSI" (Soltek
SL75FRN-2L, nForce 2 Ultra chipset. Board re-capped) it booted into Windows
just fine. I then shrunk the boot partition down (Who in their right mind
would build a machine with a 200GB boot partition? The version of Ghost that
I have ('03?) will only 'ghost' a boot partition sucessfully onto a whole
drive, creating the partition and formatting it itself.) I then
repartitioned the 200 with Partition Magic, re-installed the 80GB and copied
the data from other partitions over.

So, in at least one instance that I know of (just did it two weeks ago) it
worked fine. I wouldn't bet on it though. It just happens that Windows has
the drivers for this controller integrated, the install disc that came with
it wasn't needed (I have a few of the controllers, Windows always finds the
drivers without the driver CD). Perhaps that's why it works OK? I've never
used the RAID function of the cards, I just use them for installing SATA
drives to a PC without SATA ports onboard. They were relatively cheap.

Cheers,

 

[kony]

I have found that, with more than one controller board, the mobo BIOS will
'look' at each in turn until it finds a bootable HDD/partition. IME, as long
as there's only one bootable drive attached to the PCI cards it seems to
work. (I have fairly limited experience with this though)

It may be possible but I had an old Compaq / i810 board that
wouldn't. Both cards appear in the SiI Medly(?) Manager
software in windows and allow windows access but only the
first appears including the bios F-Key prompt to configure
the arrays.

 

[Paul]

Paul wrote:
... snip ...

You should be aware that posts are not numbered on Usenet, in fact
many posts may never arrive at any given destination. At the
moment, on my machine, this thread contains exactly seven posts.
You can refer to posts by the name of the poster, and (best) by the
internal identification code. This shows up under the Message-ID:
header, and is always unique.

And since I was referring to this "Google" web page, which does
have a number ? I've copied it for your reading pleasure...

http://groups.google.ca/group/micro..._frm/thread/75ea08ee67d4116f/474a127097f38b95

******* Post #11 from the Google web page *******
Thanks ByTor,

Did indeed read your post and didn't get a chance yesterday to execute your
post, which I really want to do today. I'll get a chance later this
afternoon. I had some boot problems when I installed (replaced) the card
which involved the computer rebooting itself just after the WinXP splash
screen. Strangely this only happened a few times then all started going OK.
But occasionally (I mean rarely) the computer would reboot itself. This
problem exploded when I installed SP2 (WinXP) and all the boot up error
messages of not being able to save, write or find data back to C:\$Mft$ and
C:\Windows\System32 folders.

I was forced to do a reinstall of Windows (not complaining I actually look
for any excuse to rebuild a machine), the first attempt after what I thought
was a successful install, I had to get in via 'Safe Mode With Command
Prompt' where in the Disk Management Console, to my amazement, the disk I
installed WinXP on, thinking it was C:\ System, was actually classified as
F:\???? My big data disk on the Sil 0680 which had nothing on it as yet was
considered as C:\ System and healthy???? I did a reinstall again (to my
enjoyment) pulling the data disk out of the Sil 0680 and all went well, then
plugged back in again and all went well. Problem went away.

I then noticed, everytime I installed or updated a driver or adjusted the
pagefile would bring this problem back, but after a few reboots all was OK.
Now I'm blocked out completely. To answer your question, yeah, I think so
because when I first did the install of the card strange things started
happening but it wasn't all that bad. Now It's all bad. I'll see later if
it's because C:\ (system disk on the motherboard is disk(1)) and the D:\ (on
the Sil 0680) is disk(0)) is causing the problems. Also you mentioned about
the notorious behaviour of the Sil 0680 Card, in your opinion, should I dump
the Sil 0680 and go back to a Promise Technology IDE card? Or After some
adjustments the Sil 0680 can come out to be a good card? And I should hold
on to it.

Thank you very much for you posts ByTor I'll post back tomorrow morning and
let you know the results.

Regards,
Winux P.
*******

Paul

 

[Daniel James]

And since I was referring to this "Google" web page, which does
have a number ? I've copied it for your reading pleasure...

It does, but you need to be aware that the number of any particular
message may change if more messages are posted to the thread. Google
numbers the messages from the top of the tree as it is drawn, when
it is drawn. Admittedly that's not very likely to happen to a thread
from two years ago.

Google URLs are a useful way to refer to other usenet posts, but the
most foolproof and reliable way to use them is to give the URL to the
specific message -- in your case that would be:

http://groups.google.ca/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.general/msg/474a127097f38b95

(from your URL click "More Options" and then "Individual Message").

As CBFalconer said, the other way to do it would be to quote the NNTP
Message-ID (which is <[email protected]> for that
message). If you express that as in the format
some newsreaders will make
it a clickable link.

For a recent message this would be much preferable to a
Google link as those of us using off-line newsreaders could look up the
reference in our local messagebases without needing to go to Google.
For a two-year-old message it doesn't matter which you do, as most
people keep less history than that in their local messagebases, and
would end up looking in Google anyway (if they cared).

Cheers,
Daniel.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

AFAIK, it is much simpler. It is not a SCSI emulation, it is just that the
BIOS option 'Boot from SCSI' makes the motherboard look for the boot device
on the PCI BUS,

where is expects to find an alternative device, but not necessarily a SCSI.

But very likely of subClass SCSI.

The device type SCSI/PATA/SATA has really nothing to do with PCI,

Wrong.
PCI IDE add-in cards (or even chipsets integrated on the MoBo) identify
by device class, one of such is subClass SCSI.
Add in PATA cards use Class "Storage controller", subClass "SCSI".
SATA controllers now have (can have) their own SATA subClass.