Strange booting problem, need help.

[J187]

I am running two WD 36Gb Raptors in Stipped Raid on the SATA Controller of my Epox 8RDA3+ With the OS and major progs on it. I am also trying to run two Seagate Baracuda's in a Mirrored Raid for Large storage on a Highpoint Raid PCI controller. Here's the problem...

PC boots fine with just Raptors plugged in and Baracuda's unpluged.
PC Boots fine with Just Baracuda's plugged in and Raptors unplugged (Installed OS to test)

PC Hangs after Highpoint Bios initializes Seagate drives when all 4 drives are connected.


I think The comp is trying to boot off both arrays when all are connected, but I've tried setting boot priority in system bios to 1. Scsi/Sata 2. Scsi/Sata 3. Scsi/Sata. I've also tried reformatting the two seagate drives and rebuiding array. I've tried Changing the "Boot disc" assignment in the highpoint bios which is for the seagate drives, but the only other option is gives me is

Disc1 = Boot
Disc2 = Hidden

Disc1 = HDD0
Disc2 = Hidden

Nothing seems to work. Help?
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[Paul Komski]

There has been a long-standing problem with boot problems/selection when you are mixing hard drives on the mobo with ones on a controller card. I see no reason for this to be any different when you have an array on one and another array on the other.

The BIOS gets confused as to which device on the "SCSI/RAID interface" it should be booting.

You might get around the problem with a boot manager such as BiNG or SBM (both in my sig) - it all depends what the BIOS tells it at start-up. You would need a small FAT partition (say 32MB) to install onto the hard drive but you could try SBM from a floppy.

Of course you will be snookered if the system still hangs but try only attempting to configure the mainboard to consider its array as the boot device and let it think the pci card is just data storage for now.

Another option might be to use boot.ini from just one device to boot the other but this is OS dependent of course as well as not having a hanging system.

[J187]

Paul, you've got it exactly. The HIghpoint controller takes boot presedence over the other, no matter what I do. Even when I set neither drive as a "Boot" drive in Bios, when the PC POSTs it resets the first drive to "Boot" drive. I think I am going to just forego the Dual Raid setup and go for a Raid 0 on the raptors and use that for my OS and progs and use the two large storage drives on the onboard IDE wihtout any sort of Raid and just use Acronis True IMage to Backup one drive to the other on a weekly schedule. Pretty much the same end Result. Thanks.

[Paul Komski]

it resets the first drive to "Boot" driveAs long as you know which is which and the system completes POST then a boot manager intalled on that the first drive might get round your BIOS confusion.