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Asus A7V: Can't boot off ATA/100 drive

M

mitcharf

Junior Member
Hi,

I just bought a new system with the Asus A7V motherboard and an Ultra ATA/100 hard disk. Naturally I want to make that my primary drive and boot from it. But there is trouble in paradise.

I know that I can't just plug the drive into the Promise controller to begin with, for I am told that Windows 98 does not recognize the controller initially. So I partition and format the disk while attached to the normal IDE controller, and then install Windows 98. I installed my network card, and updated the drivers for my soundcard and graphics card. Then I began installing the updated motherboard drivers.

First I installed the Apollo VIA 4-in-1 stuff, and then I installed the new promise drivers. Once this installation was done (complete with restarts and all), I shut down the machine, moved the IDE cable over to the Promise controller, and rebooted. It says it wants me to insert a system disk, because it can't find an OS on the hard drive.

I have the latest BIOS. Moreover, when I have the hard disk attached to the Promise controller and I boot from CD or floppy, I can access the disk. I just can't seem to boot from it. I tried this both with the Promise drivers provided on the Asus CD AND the latest Promise drivers available on the Asus web site.

What suggestions do you have? Do I need to repartition the drive while it is attached to the Promise controller? Do I need to NOT install some of the VIA 4-in-1 drivers (I installed all of them, including PCI bus mastering).

My other system components are:

PCI network card
Asus V7100 GeForce2 MX AGP
Soundblaster PCI 128
Asus DVD-ROM (slave on secondary IDE)
Maxtor Ultra ATA/100 20GB drive

What do you think? I'd like to be able to boot from this disk.

Thanks,
Mitch
 
Did you tell the BIOS to boot from the Promise controller first? then look for an IDE harddrive then CDROM? Or something to that effect.
 
What cavingjan say should fix your problem.

Set your 1st boot to "floppy."
2nd boot to "SCSI/Promise ATA 100 Controller."


 
Also, switch your DVD to the primary IDE controller on the ATA66. I have heard of problems trying to boot off the ATA100 when there is a drive attached to the secondary IDE on the ATA66.
 
This is what worked for me just fine...
Installed the drivers for the Promise, plugged my IBM Deskstar 75GXP into the ATA100 port, then went to BIOS, and set the boot sequence to floppy... other<SCSI device...
 
Speaking of BIOS settings, I forgot to mention that the setting for ATA Boot first or whatever its called needs to be enabled as well.
 
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