SCSI drive wont boot/coexist with IDE Raid Controller

[Juzzam]

We have a SCSI drive with the OS on it and want to setup a raid array
to store non-OS files. We bought some HighPoint Rocket Raid 100 cards
(our motherboards supports only up to 100ATA) and two IDE drives per
card.

When the RocketRaid card is connected to the IDE drives, the SCSI OS
drive doesn't boot. Here is the email I sent to HighPoint tech support
(they haven't responded of course):



Hello there,

We are having problems booting a separate SCSI drive when using your
adapter for two IDE drives (total of 3 hard drives on each machine).

I hope you can help, we are trying to use your Rocket Raid 100
(HTP302N) adapter at a datacenter at the University of Florida.

Our Setup
-----------------
MSI K7-Master-S (MS-6341) Motherboards
http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=K7_Master-S&class=mb

The motherboards includes this embedded SCSI adapter:
Adaptec AIC-7899 SCSI adapter (with BIOS v2.57)

We are using a single SCSI hard drive for the OS only (no raid):
Seagate Cheetah X15 160Ultra 18.35GB
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/scsi/st318451lw.html

We are trying to use your RAID adapter to setup ftp space separate from
the OS. Each machine has two of these IDE drives connected to your
Raid adapter:
120GB SEAGATE ATA100 EIDE Barracuda ST3120026A
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/ata/st3120026a.html
----------------

The problem is when the IDE drives are plugged into the Raid adapter we
get: "Disk boot failure, Insert system disk and press enter"

The motherboard bios has "SCSI" set as the first boot device. If the
RAID adapter card is in it's slot and no drives are connected to it,
the SCSI drive does boot. The OS drive fails to boot when one ore more
IDE hard drives are connected to the Raid controller. We have not
formatted the IDE drives or setup an array yet.

What we have tried so far:
-----------------

(1) Updated the motherboard bios to 6341MS V1.5 (Award Bios)

(2) Updated your HPT302N Bios to v2.351

(3) We enabled "EBDA reallocation" using "load /c /i /v 3xxv235.p6e"

(4) We tried deselecting "BOOT" on HDD0 under the "Set Boot Disk" menu
of the HTP302N Bios Utility, but it does not seem to save this. Upon
re-entering the Bios it has "BOOT" next to it again.

(5) We noticed this issue in the readme, however could not find where
to disable EBDA reallocation in the Adaptec AIC-7899 bios (we did
enable EBDA for your bios as shown above):
* Compatibility issue with Adaptec SCSI adapter

If you encounter compatibility problems when you use HPT3xx
controller
together with Adaptec SCSI adapter, please try to disable EBDA
reallocation
in Adaptec SCSI BIOS, or enable "EBDA reallocation" in HPT3xx BIOS.

You can use BIOS loading utility v2.2.07.01 or later to enable this

feature (e.g. "load /c bios372.232").
-----------------

One last thing we noticed is in regard to the 5.2 Set Boot Disk section
of instruction manual which says "The Set Boot Disk item appears only
when no hard disk is connected to the motherboard IDE connector." This
doesn't seem to be true in our case, because when we connect one of the
IDE drives to motherboard and the other to the RAID controller, the
bios still displays "Set Boot Disk." The motherboard detects the IDE
drive connected to it because it displays it on the screen with the IDE
CD-ROM on startup.

Thanks for your help,
Juzzam

 

[J. Clarke]

We have a SCSI drive with the OS on it and want to setup a raid array
to store non-OS files. We bought some HighPoint Rocket Raid 100 cards
(our motherboards supports only up to 100ATA) and two IDE drives per
card.

The most likely difficulty is that the RocketRAID is being detected as a
SCSI device (most IDE RAID boards are detected as such) and has priority
over the onboard SCSI. If you have control over IRQ assignments then see
if you can assign the onboard host adapter a lower-numbered IRQ than the
RocketRAID. Otherwise, move it from slot to slot and see if the
automatically assigned IRQ changes to something workable. It may not be
possible with your motherboard to boot from the onboard SCSI host adapter
with the the RocketRAID present.