Getting a single SATA drive to act as boot device on A7V600-X board

[Phil Thompson]

I am trying to get a single Samsung SATA 120 GB drive to work as boot
drive for Windows XP on an A7V600-X board.

Thus far I have downloaded the latest VIA drivers for the RAID onboard
VT8237 Southbridge and updated the BIOS. With an IDE drive camped in
we got to see and partition the SATA drive and installed a copy of
Windows XP Home to it starting from the version running on the IDE.

After going nowhere tok the IDE drive out and went to re-install XP
including doing the F6 trick with the latest RAID drivers on a floppy.
XP sets up fine and the first partition of the drive is used OK.

After rebooting without the XP CD in we get stuck as there is no
bootable drive listed. Can't see a way to get the SATA drive on the
boot list. Tried SCSI option but it didn't fly.

Suggestions please for getting single SATA drive in non-RAID config
onto boot menu in BIOS ?

Phil

 

[Paul]

I am trying to get a single Samsung SATA 120 GB drive to work as boot
drive for Windows XP on an A7V600-X board.

Thus far I have downloaded the latest VIA drivers for the RAID onboard
VT8237 Southbridge and updated the BIOS. With an IDE drive camped in
we got to see and partition the SATA drive and installed a copy of
Windows XP Home to it starting from the version running on the IDE.

After going nowhere tok the IDE drive out and went to re-install XP
including doing the F6 trick with the latest RAID drivers on a floppy.
XP sets up fine and the first partition of the drive is used OK.

After rebooting without the XP CD in we get stuck as there is no
bootable drive listed. Can't see a way to get the SATA drive on the
boot list. Tried SCSI option but it didn't fly.

Suggestions please for getting single SATA drive in non-RAID config
onto boot menu in BIOS ?

Phil

Section 3.4.5 of the manual is titled "Select Boot Array".
Maybe that will get it to show in the boot order.
Otherwise, there don't seem to be many options for that RAID.

Paul

 

[Gareth Jones]

Section 3.4.5 of the manual is titled "Select Boot Array".
Maybe that will get it to show in the boot order.
Otherwise, there don't seem to be many options for that RAID.

Worrying. I've got three A7V600 boards now. One had dual SATA in a RAID0
running XP. No probs there, but at some point in the future, I'm going
to probably swap the PATA drives in the other two to SATA!!

I take it you have the onboard ATA bios enabled? (Must have I guess).
The last bootable device in the list set to 'SCSI / external device' (or
similar) should do it.

I don't have a spare SATA drive around or I'd give it a go!

Let us know how you get on.

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[Phil Thompson]

Section 3.4.5 of the manual is titled "Select Boot Array".
Maybe that will get it to show in the boot order.
Otherwise, there don't seem to be many options for that RAID.

we can't do RAID with one drive, so never get that option to select
boot array.

Phil

 

[Phil Thompson]

I take it you have the onboard ATA bios enabled? (Must have I guess).
The last bootable device in the list set to 'SCSI / external device' (or
similar) should do it.

*last* bootable device ? We did get it to work, with SCSI, Floppy, CD
as the boot order. We can run SCSI, CD, Floppy as the boot order
also, repeatably.

What did we do ? not 100% certain. Last night we flashed the BIOS of
the mobo up to the latest 1004 from the Asus site (which is later than
the Asus updater tool gets you) - this eliminated an error due to a
slow fan in the system which got rid of POST stoppong each time. This
in itself wasn't enough to make it boot from SATA.
http://www.asus.com.tw/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=A7V600-X

Today we used the latest VIA drivers
http://downloads.viaarena.com/drivers/RAID/VIA_RAID_V300b.zip on a
floppy with the F6 option in Windows, then ran the setup.exe after
Windows had installed using these drivers.

Next we poured over the BIOS screens looking for things that may help
- there is no SATA reference at all and anything RAID specific
(accessed via TAB key after POST) don't work at all with a single
drive.

We did go into the HDD manual setup on IDE2 just looking to see if
maybe we could find something SATA related, we hadn't done that before
and although we left it as we found it it makes me wonder (it was
about the only thing memorably different in 10 reboots).

We did not update anything else before the reboot, so there were lots
of yellow question marks in Device Manager

If you're going to use 2 SATA drives then you get the ATA bios RAID
menus and can select a boot array, but this isn't an option with a
single drive.

The symptoms of our problem were a SATA drive that we had formatted
and used from Windows, installed windows on but could not boot from.
It was a BIOS level issue as Windows never got to try starting as we
sat at a black screen without a boot device working.

Phil

 

[Gareth Jones]

*last* bootable device ? We did get it to work, with SCSI, Floppy, CD
as the boot order. We can run SCSI, CD, Floppy as the boot order
also, repeatably.

Mine is set with all the bootable devices disabled, apart from the last
one. Works fine.

What did we do ? not 100% certain. Last night we flashed the BIOS of
the mobo up to the latest 1004 from the Asus site

Strange. Maybe its because you have the -X version, but mine are
'standard' A7V600 boards, the bios version was 1004 from last year
sometime.
Its 1005 now with a beta 1006 ???

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Personal email for Gareth Jones can be sent to:
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[Paul]

we can't do RAID with one drive, so never get that option to select
boot array.

Phil

Start here:

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=310

I see mention of JBOD. Now, "Just a Bunch Of Disks" implies you
could use one disk. JBOD may require "dynamic disk" formatting
or something - all I know is the term, but not the consequences
of using that format.

Have a look through the Via package:

http://downloads.viaarena.com/drivers/RAID/VIA_RAID_V300b.zip

So far, I have to agree with your opinion that it requires a
minimum of two disks.

But logically, think about this. If a RAID mirror is broken,
then it must be able to run with just one good disk connected.
The disk may be marked as an orphan, but the controller should
still be able to start. What good would a mirror be, if the
controller wouldn't start with one disk, after the second
disk fails.

There has got to be a way...

The final solution, is there are two BIOS addition files for
the Via RAID. From the "readme.txt" file in the V300b.zip
package:

"VT6420 (VT8237 SATA):
SATA RAID BIOS: 6420Rxxx.rom; This BIOS supports SATA RAID

None RAID BIOS: 6420Nxxx.rom; This BIOS does not support
RAID functions and does not
support installing Windows 98SE
or Me into SATA HDD."

Now, hacking the BIOS to use 6420Nxxx.rom, instead of whatever
version of 6420Rxxx.rom that Asus has appended to the current
BIOS file, isn't going to be easy, but I think the idea is,
that supports individual drives.

Many other RAID controllers support single drive
operation, via doing an "Auto Setup" with just one
drive connected to the controller. While I've seen
comments about the odd controller that won't load its
RAID BIOS, unless two disks are connected, I would think
if the RAID BIOS will load, there has got to be a way to
get it to boot and work, with one drive.

HTH,
Paul

 

[notritenoteri]

Just installed a BArracuda 160GB Sata. Just downloaded the tools from
Seagate and kept hitting next drive was recognized and all data from C: was
copied over. set it as boot device under BOOT options in bios. The Sata
drive shows as a SCSI drive I now have to reasign drive letters and make XP
think its drive C: I don't think its booting from it though it is the first
boot device in list. Tomorrow morning is it for reassigning drive letters

 

[Phil Thompson]

Mine is set with all the bootable devices disabled, apart from the last
one. Works fine.

so your boot order is nothing, nothing, nothing, SCSI ??

Phil

 

[Phil Thompson]

So far, I have to agree with your opinion that it requires a
minimum of two disks.

But logically, think about this. If a RAID mirror is broken,
then it must be able to run with just one good disk connected.
The disk may be marked as an orphan, but the controller should
still be able to start. What good would a mirror be, if the
controller wouldn't start with one disk, after the second
disk fails.

agreed, however at the *setup* stage it is logical that the tools only
play with two drives present, and once that is setup you're probably
OK if one breaks.

There has got to be a way...

The final solution, is there are two BIOS addition files for
the Via RAID. From the "readme.txt" file in the V300b.zip
package:

"VT6420 (VT8237 SATA):
SATA RAID BIOS: 6420Rxxx.rom; This BIOS supports SATA RAID

None RAID BIOS: 6420Nxxx.rom; This BIOS does not support
RAID functions and does not
support installing Windows 98SE
or Me into SATA HDD."

Now, hacking the BIOS to use 6420Nxxx.rom, instead of whatever
version of 6420Rxxx.rom that Asus has appended to the current
BIOS file, isn't going to be easy, but I think the idea is,
that supports individual drives.

maybe just deleting the R version from the unzipped files would do it.

I also noticed
" 8) Notes
VIA RAID driver is a combo driver for VIA VT6410, VT6420,
VT6421, and VT8237 SATA RAID controller.
Its file name is different from previous drivers that
released. If your system has been installed
VT6410 V2.xx, VT6420 V2.xx, or VT6421 V1.xx driver, please
uninstall them first then install this
new driver."

so my format and reinstall probably helped.

An explicit bios flashing utility for the SATA controller would help.

Phil

 

[Phil Thompson]

Strange. Maybe its because you have the -X version, but mine are
'standard' A7V600 boards, the bios version was 1004 from last year
sometime.

yes, that board is ahead of the -X variant which released 1004 last
week.

Phil

 

[notritenoteri]

no boot order is SCSI, CD,IDE,floppy

so your boot order is nothing, nothing, nothing, SCSI ??

Phil

 

[Gareth Jones]

so your boot order is nothing, nothing, nothing, SCSI ??

Yup.

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Personal email for Gareth Jones can be sent to:
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[Phil Thompson]

Yup.

did you just turn off all the others and leave it sat at the end, or
did you find that was where it had to be ?

Phil

 

[Gareth Jones]

did you just turn off all the others and leave it sat at the end, or
did you find that was where it had to be ?

I just normally do it that way so that its easier to set any of the
previous ones to CD or floppy if required, then remove them once I know
I won't be needing that option.
No other real reason. If the SCSI/external option is there in the other
boot positions, I'd expect it to work there as well.
Might be a bug of course and I just happened to pick a working config by
chance!



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Personal email for Gareth Jones can be sent to:
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followed by 'uk2' followed by a dot
followed by 'net'
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[notritenoteri]

The BIOS (or at least mine) allows you to change the order as you wish to.
It is not intuitive how to move them up or down but I finally got desperate
and read the rather (to me) confusing instructions.