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Help me find HDs *solved*

lozina

lozina

Lifer
I just popped in an IDE HD on my server and now it won't boot. During post it detects both the IDE and the SCSI HD's which are the only two HD's I have. The SCSI has all the boot files and has always been C: But now that I inserted this IDE (on a Promise Ultra/ATA controller) it won't seem to find either HDs when it boots. I tried fdisk off a boot disk and not even fdisk sees either drive. My only guess is to set the jumpers so one is slave one is master but that dosent make much sense to me since they are on different cables let only totally differenty BUS. Should I set my SCSI as master and the IDE as slave? I woulda tried this already but I'm still lookin for the manual for the scsi- the ide has the jumper setup nicely printed on the sticker but not the scsi. any ideas pls let me know!
 
oh wait silly me. scsi's dont have master/slave. Doh

what do i do now....

i already installed the drivers for the promise controller before i put the ide drive in...

and its not a problem with the combo since i had this working before i just cant for the life of me remember what could've changed...
 
ok nevermind bout FDISK... this is what i got out of it though:

for some reason it picks up the IDE as the default drive- this is the info it showed:

Partition info:
Partition = 1
Status = A
Type = NTFS
MBytes = 10781 (this is wrong, even the Promis BIOS picked it up as 7670 like it should be)
System = nothing
Usage = 100%

so it set the current fixed disk to my other drive (which is the one which has the winnt boot files in the first place. and should be considered the 'default drive')

Partition = 1
Status = A
Type = NTFS
MBytes = 8668
System = nothing
Usage = 100%

I tried to use the Set Active partition option but it sais "only partitions on drive 1 can be made active"

Also, when i bott up with a floppy to be able to run fdisk, i tried accessing c: & d: but both times said 'invalid drive specification'

I attempted to solve this thru BIOS but no luck... I thought it had the answer when i noticed the entry "HDD Sequence" had IDE first instead of SCSI but upon changing it yielding no change.
Nothing else in BIOS looked like it might help.

As soon as i remove the ide drive i boot up fine with my scsi.... why can't I get them to coexist? I tried setting the jumpers on the ide on all 3 modes and nothing worked (except when i changed it to "master w/ slave" (even tho it's by itself). this produced an odd result as the Promise BIOS was unable to detect it, the boot up went through on the SCSI drive though, and upon entering windows it actually found my ide drive but it but it at F: (weird) but even stranger, it thought it was a SCSI device. I was still able to access files on it... very weird!)

so anyway id really appreciate some insight into what i need to do to get these drives to co-exist again! (oh and last side note my mobo has latest bios)

the mobo is an ASUS p2b-ls w/ award bios, 450 pentium 2, 390 mb ram
win2k on the scsi drive (seagate 9 gig ultra2), only files on the ide (Western digital 80 gig ultra ata/100)
 
Does the IDE HD have an install of an OS on it? You have two bootable hard drives in your system...

When you take the IDE HD out of your system, does it go back to working like normal?
 
The IDE has no OS on it anymore... although it used to. I deltree'd the winnt folder.. there MAY be some boot.ini file or something in the root tho-- not entirely sure. would that be significant?

yes, as soon as i remove the ide the system boots fine.

with ide in the system, winnt says "<windows boot dir>ntoskernel.exe" not found or something like that.

do you think you know what might be wrong now? Thanks for the reply!

EDIT: ok i think i see where you're getting at. ill make sure the boot.ini file is gone off the ide and any other system files for that matter.
 
You should always reformat a disk before putting it into a new system - simply deleting the winnt folder won't really help you.

I bet if you format the sucker, everything will work fine...
 
Cool, i am betting its gonna work too. as soon as i leave class im gonna go remove those system files. I just didnt understand why the computer would look for the boot files on the IDE. Isnt there any way to force it to look at the scsi drive first? oh well no big deal. Thanks for clearing the cob webs in my head MisterDuck, it's obvious stuff like this i always overlook 🙂
 
I know there's software that would let you pick which drive you want to boot off of, but I don't run any dual boot systems so I can't really answer that question....anybody know about this?


In the bios too I bet you can specifiy which drive it boots off of first - try looking in the SCSI bios too.

Either way, the easy fix is to just zap the IDE HD and format it with an empty partition.
 
what's the scsi id of the controller card? if memory serves, my 2940AU card wanted to be scsi id 7 by default... you might be having conflicts. just one last thing (I've made this mistake before) - everything's terminated properly? I know that gave me some trouble when I had forgot to put termination on properly.


<edit> Forgot to mention, the promise IDE controllers are detected/used exactly the same as a scsi controller (insert in bios, etc) so unless you have a way to make them insert in the order you wish, it's going to detect the active boot partitions of each drive in the order of the bios scan... there may be some settings to fool with in the cards themselves, but the format would fix that problem.... as for above, well, I didn't read the post carefully - oops.
 
did you set the boot sequence to "A, CDROM, SCSI"?

or whatever combination you want, as long as SCSI is before IDE-0.
 
Ok I had to call ASUS bout this one. And boy was it an easy problem to fix. Dont you hate when something puts you through so much trouble then you find out there's a simple little setting you need to change to make it all better?!

Anyway, there was a BIOS setting tucked away in the PCI & PNP section (which of course I didnt think to look in) which allows you to boot the scsi controller first. The problem was the BIOS kept loading the Promise controller first no matter how i set the boot sequence, or even a BIOS setting called "IDE/SCSI First" which dosen't seem to do anything... So the IDE drive would continue to be designated as the C: or boot drive every time. So upon changing this obscure PCI & PNP setting it works FINE!

LAst time I had IDE & SCSI together it was because the IDE was the bootup drive anyway... so thats why it worked!

Thanks for the help though dudes!
 
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