Can't get it to boot off the RAID on aMSI K7T Turbo-r

[CandyKid]

I have my primary OS on my raid controller. The only way i can get it to boot off it is to disconnect all other bootable harddrives and have it search for other boot devices set to enabled in bios. Was there a bios update that added the IDE Raid option in the bios. I have tried every other option HD0-3, scsi, zip etc.

Also i have a tbird 800 (8*100) when i set the fsb jumper to 133 i can't get it to post. Does this make me another victim of not fully capable bios of msi!

Thanks for your responses

oh and currently my raid harddrive is set to F: and my other harddrive is set to C: .. IS it possible to switch them... I've tried partion magic and disk manager. Possibly if i only boot with one harddrive it'd be c? I'll have to give that a try later.

 

[bluesky]

So, you have 2 drives, and one on Promise and another one on Primary Ide?
And you have c drive on the hdd on ide 1, and f drive on the hdd on Promise, Ide 3?
Do both, c and f drives have OS on it. If it's the case, it makes sense you have to disable the c drive to boot from f drive. You can check the hdd on Promise configured as a boot drive from the raid utility and which hdd gets the proiority to boot from bios.
I'm not sure what it's like on bios when you have 2 or more drives, since I have only one drive on raid, and it doesn't make any difference for me whether I check my boot drive as SCSI or IDE 0. But you might have to check SCSI first to boot from the hdd on raid if bios shows IDE 0 and SCSI as bootable drives.

And for removing the jumper for 133mhz fsb. I heard if you take it off, the board will read from default multiplier, so 133x8=1064, it might be too high to post. Anyway, that's what I read.

 

[RBuck]

You need to set your boot priority using the Promise array as "SCSI". As far as your motherboard is concerned the Promise card (chip) is a SCSI card.

So set boot priority to: A:, SCSI, CDROM (for instance)

 

[CandyKid]

When i have my bios set to SCSI as the ONLY boot up device and i have the option to try other boot devices DISABLED. I get an invalid system disk error that i believe is the same error i get as if i put a unbootable floppy and tried to boot from it. So the only way to boot from my raid is to have no other bootable floppy connected and i believe it finds the drive when it tries to boot other devices.

If i booted up on my raid drive (which was labeled f when i partioned it in win2k) and it was the ONLY drive connected. Would it change the letter to C: ? and if it does is there a way i can change the drive letter of the other drive so that i could switch them and give the raid drive priority?

Thanks guys.

 

[jfkaiser]

Hi Guys,

Here is what I discovered and sent to MSI Tech Support

I have a resolution for my case for you. This concerns a dangerous issue with the currently shipping BIOS v2.4 on the MSI K7T Turbo RAID motherboard.

This again is the issue of the K7T Turbo RAID motherboard not displaying the Promise BIOS boot screen when used with some TNT2 and GEForce 256 AGP cards......two VERY popular video cards.

If you read my last e-mail I mentioned I would try to install a Matrox G400 video card as yet another AGP card test and see if I could see the Promise RAID bios screen. That DID work....so now I knew the problem seemed to be specific to the Nvidia cards.

I had browsed the newsgroups yesterday and found some people talking about errors during bios flashing.
One of the first things I tried to do when I first discovered the problem described above was to flash up to the AWARD(R) V1.0B16 Special BIOS BETA bios for overclockers, but I was unable to flash as I did not know about the "/nbl" switch that ignores the BIOS lock error message.
Thanks to the newsgroups, last night, I tried flashing to the B16 Beta bios (Power Users Bios) using the "/nbl" switch and now my TNT2 and GEForce 256 cards work properly and display the Promise RAID bios screen as they should.
The new Beta Bios appears to put the Promise RAID controller on INTB instead of INTA and so now the resources don't get "stomped on" by the NVidia AGP cards mentioned above.
If you guys want to prevent a lot of RMA's (as I was about to do and send mine back) You should get a Non-Beta version of that "V1.0B16 Special BIOS" out on the website and shipped with your motherboards.....to prevent people from going thru the hours of painful discovery that I had to.
I did also notice that now your website does mention the "/nbl" switch in the Beta Bios section. I am glad you guys did that. If that /nbl switch notice had been posted earlier I would have resolved the issue myself immediately.

Thank You
Jon Kaiser


Also note that if you enable the "USB Mouse legacy option" in bios it will stomp on the Promise Bios screen you're suppossed to see.

 

[jfkaiser]

Hi....Im Back !!

Ok here is the latest attempt at a solution regarding the 133 bus stuff.
I had been running back at the 100 FSB speed after my failures to get back to 133fsb mentioned above. PC had been running for about 3-4 hours....not sure if PC being warmed up had anything to do with what follows....

I decided to try and get back to a bootable 7.5 multiplier (whether it be at 100 or 133) I just wanted to see if I could ever get machine to hold at 7.5 again.

I kept bus at 100 fsb and set Duron600 for 9x. I hit F10 to save and rebooted OK..no power off and bleed this time. I did NOT hit F10 and power off immediately as describe in my earlier post. I just did F10 and saw if PC got video sync or not. That is same for what is described below too.

Next I went for 8.5 and saved. Got no video sync after save reboot, so powered off and bled PC by depressing power button with Power strip off. This time machine DID come back at 8.5 x 100.

Next I went down to 8x then finally the desired 7.5x multiplier following exact process mentioned above about powering off and bleeding.......woo hoo I got machine to talk to 7.5 again.

Final step was to change jumper to 133fsb and see if machine came up.....YES success, and once again I am writing this from a PC actually running 7.5 x 136 fsb = 1020MHhz.

I only pray that tomorrow when I turn the PC on again it will come up at 1020 and not fail as it did earlier today.

I don't know if the changing back to 100 fsb and then starting to go down from 9x to 7.5 is really necessary.......If I have to do this again I will try leaving the fsb at 133 and coming down from 9x to 7.5 (if my Duron can handle 9 x133 just to get the wierd process going on way down to 7.5

I would hope that something here can be logically explained and fixed in future bios release. I read something about Hi and Low states of the Durons and maybe my strange procedure somehow switches those states and lets me re-attain the 7.5 multiplier....I'm not sure.

Thx,
Jon

 

[CandyKid]

Any experiance with booting from the raid? I'm able to see my raid bios fine with my V5...

 

[bluesky]

Jon.
That's very interesting. Let us know you got it back permanently.

CandyKid.
Disconnect the c drive and boot it up with only the hdd on Promise.
Did you see the * asterisk on next to the array number. It means the drive is configured as bootable.

 

[jfkaiser]

Hi,

Originally, my Promise Bios came up with a PCI video card in it so I knew it was some sort of wierd AGP resource "stomp". The Overclockers B16 bios stopped that from being a problem, although as I mentioned the "enabling of USB Mouse legacy support" in bios will also stomp on the Promise BIOS.

Regarding the 133 fsb thing. I have had a couple of days of good boots so far. I always do a shut down at the end of my session and bleed residual power after killing the power strip.

I did have one time where Windows tried to restart my PC and it hung with no video sync. I then did a "power off and bleed" and PC incorrectly came up as 816 (factory multiplier 6x time 136 Mhz bus). Immediately did another power off and bleed and came up correctly at 1020 (136 x 7.5).

Just have to see if its worth the hassle. MSI bios is wanting to "phone home" to the chips original multiplier (at least on the Duron) and so far the only way to get around it is what I described about starting higher multiplier and dropping it down in steps.

If I have to start sacrificing goats next, I'll have to give up on the MSI board as a good 133 fsb candidate (at least with a Duron) and go back to Abit or Asus.

Thx,
Jon

 

[CandyKid]

Hmm... so what will i loose by going to Asus.

Dled? heh

and i'm sorry i'm very busy with college and haven't had time to read the Iwill review but anand gave it a higher rating then the asus and msi board what makes this board superior.

I personally would switch to an asus board if i can cause it'd solve my tbird 800 post problems.

 

[CandyKid]

correct me if i'm wrong.. the ASUS has equivalent stability... little better performance (too little to be noticable. to me at least) better memory overclocking features, same promise raid controller, and !!! no problems with the 100/133 fsb?

man i want an asus now

 

[CandyKid]

Hmm... I was also thinking... Is this theoretically possible if MSI spent the time to do it.

Release a bios that would allow you to change the FSB in the bios. and as a default you would just jumper the current jumper to 100mhz. So it'd boot with the hardware controlling it then the bios would take control when the clock multiplier could be adjusted. I'd imagine that'd be hard to change in the BIOS if you have hardware controlling it but it make me think more about sending my board back in for an ASUS.