PC-DL boot problems with Rocketraid 1820

[Eugene]

Newbie post, so help me out if you could.

Have just installed the PC-DL with 1Gb RAM, single 2.4GHz Xeon and
blah blah but more essentially, a highpoint rocketraid 1820 with 2
RAID 5 arrays (made of 4 37Gb raptors and 4 74Gb raptors).

No other disks attached to the mobo sata or pata. Here's the weird
bit: installed win2003 server using the cd-rom and the supplied
rocketraid driver floppy. All installed nicely but on reboot, I
entered into the bios and disabled all the other bootable devices
except the first boot device set to hard disk - the hard disk device
picked up that it only have the rocketraid sata raid device. The
intention was to speed up the boot process - no pata on ide1, disabled
the on-board promise raid and sata.

On reboot, I get the no system disk error!!! as if the rocketraid
raid5 arrays were not there. The raid5 shows up in the rocketraid bios
and the boot device is setup correctly. The really weird bit is that
if a bootable CD is in the cd-rom and its the first boot device,
during bootup, I don't hit a key so that it doesn't boot from cd-rom,
it will boot from the rocketraid array!!!

Have tried setting the bios to have the promise on-board raid on/off,
the onboard sata on/off but don't have onboard sata raid set, as this
conflicts with the rocketraid and the bios process doesn't get pass
the rocketraid detect disks.

So, apart from having the win2003 cd-rom in the cd and the first boot
device set to the cd-rom all the time, how can I get around this
problem? I have flashed the pc-dl to the latest bios (pcdl003.bin).

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Eugene]

Nobody has ever done this or come across this problem? Any help appreciated.

 

[Eugene]

Could anybody help please? Have posted this to ASUS and Highpoint but
to no avail. Any help whatsoever is greatly appreciated.

Eugene

 

[Paul]

Could anybody help please? Have posted this to ASUS and Highpoint but
to no avail. Any help whatsoever is greatly appreciated.

Eugene

I take it you've tried adjusting the boot order ? For example,
what happens if the CDROM is not listed as one of the three
boot options ? Does the system still try to validate the CDROM
and look for a CD in it ?

If you've filed a report using the web based report page, you
might have to wait a while for a BIOS update to fix it. Look how
many releases of other 875/865 board BIOS it took to fix boot
order issues. I don't know if Asus is fixing the issues, or
they are fixed by the BIOS vendor, and thus the delay.

HTH,
Paul