SCSI drive to default to being 'C' drive?

[Guest]

Hello,

I have a MSI K8N Neo 2 motherboard with a 36gig SCSI drive connected to a
PCI SCSI card and two SATA drives configured to SATA ports 3 & 4. I want
the SCSI drive to be the boot drive for WinXP. My problem is that when I
go through the Windows setup, the SCSI drive is the 'E' drive and the SATA
drives appear as 'C' & 'D'.

My question is - how do I force the SCSI drive to default to being 'C'
drive?


Thanks,
Shane

 

[someone]

Hello,

I have a MSI K8N Neo 2 motherboard with a 36gig SCSI drive connected to a
PCI SCSI card and two SATA drives configured to SATA ports 3 & 4. I want
the SCSI drive to be the boot drive for WinXP. My problem is that when I
go through the Windows setup, the SCSI drive is the 'E' drive and the SATA
drives appear as 'C' & 'D'.

My question is - how do I force the SCSI drive to default to being 'C'
drive?

Unplug the 2 SATAs to see if the SCSI shows up as C:
If it does, install XP, then plug in the SATAs.

 

[Guest]

Thanks. I disabled the drives in the bios and was then able to get the scsi
drive recognized as 'C' drive and install XP.

Regards,
shane

 

[SP Goodman]

Hello,

I have a MSI K8N Neo 2 motherboard with a 36gig SCSI drive connected to a
PCI SCSI card and two SATA drives configured to SATA ports 3 & 4. I want
the SCSI drive to be the boot drive for WinXP. My problem is that when I
go through the Windows setup, the SCSI drive is the 'E' drive and the SATA
drives appear as 'C' & 'D'.

My question is - how do I force the SCSI drive to default to being 'C'
drive?

Hi Shane,

I can't believe MS hasn't solved this problem yet, as I went through it with
Win2000, with any non-IDE disk. Setup always goes for Disk 0, Port 0 it
seems. Perhaps it's caused by the ongoing spat between SCSI and the PC
platform. I always noticed one always has had to have a 3rd-party BIOS load
to support a SCSI drive; during Setup for both 2000 and XP one has to have a
diskette with the drivers for the other-than-standard-it-seems device handy
(press F6 when prompted). The only way I've ever been able to get a non-IDE
drive to be the boot/C: is to disconnect the other drives before bootup and
install, and have the floppy ready.

Is there a speed factor you need for your C:/boot or something? IDEs and
SATAs are pretty fast and aren't overpriced like their SCSI cousins. If the
drive-in-question is an older drive you just want to keep using, I'd
recommend it not be the boot drive, but a fast data drive.

While one might find it easy to shriek at Microsoft for the non-support for
most SCSI devices, I suspect the non-cooperation is in the SCSI camp, which
has nestled quite comfortably in the Sun/Macintosh camps since their
beginnings. Otherwise wouldn't you see a lot of on-the-motherboard chipsets
that supported SCSI? So much for that, hope this helps.

--
Stephen Goodman

* Cartoons about DVDs and Stuff
* http://www.earthlight.net/HiddenTrack
* The Loop Of The Week since 1996!
* http://www.earthlight.net/Studios

 

[Squibbly]

you mean can you uninstall the IDE drives and leave the SATA drives as the
boot??

 

[Guest]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your reply. I was able to force the scsi drive to be
recognised as 'C' drive, by disabling the SATA dtives in the bios and after
the XP install, re-enabling them.

The drive in question is one of a number of 36gig Fujitsu SCSI drives (of
recent manudacture) that I was able to obtain cheaply. They are 10k drives
and were cheaper than the Western Digital 10k SATA drive currently on the
market. I suppose there is not much of a speed advantage with my setup. I
have the OS and Program install files on the SCSI drive and data on the SATA
drives. I have found this compensates for not having a RAID0 configuration
of SATA drives. I found the latter a pain when the array would break.

Regards,
Shane

 

[Guest]

you mean can you uninstall the IDE drives and leave the SATA drives as the
boot??

No. There are no IDE drives in the PC - only a SCSI drive and two SATA
drives. I disabled the SATA drives in the bios so that the SCSI drive,
which is recognised in the Neo 2's bios, can boot off the LSI SCSI card's
bios. If I did'nt disable the SATA drives, one of them would keep coming
up a 'C' drive during the initial XP installation.