Help with AHA-2940 needed...

[sanych]

Hi,
To describe the problem briefly - when I boot up and press Ctrl-A for Adaptec SCSI Utility I get all the usual menus except for Boot Device. I have had that Boot Device menu item with my AHA-2940UW on the same system. Consequently(?), the AHA-2940 does not want to boot from a CD (which it is supposed to do just fine as I understand)... Anybody knows what is wrong? Is the card too old? But on the Adaptec site in the manual to 2940 the Boot Device menu is mentioned as a standard feature. Thanks in advance.
VN

 

[Lorne]

There is no boot device menu in SCSI controllers (Not saying all so please dont go there).
I think I know what you are trying to do, I ass-u-me you are trying to boot from scsi drives and also have ide HDD's in the same system.
fix for this possible problem... Set the IDE drives in your main bios to none and windows will mount them.
IDE drives are only needed in the bios if you are booting from them or Fdisk-format from DOS.
If its just to boot from SCSI cdrom that your looking for it gets a little more complicated, In your main puter bios SET BOOT SCSI FIRST and the others BOOT CDR where the floppy,hd,......

Hope this helps some.

 

[pdo]

I also have the 2940 and could never get my SCSI DVD-ROM to boot. But I have seen people that use the 2930 boot from the SCSI cdrom just fine.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

I believe you have to set the option that is something like "treat removable media as a fixed disk" to "on boot". Though the 2940 and 2940W cards were made before the idea of booting to a CDROM was really considered as a viable option.

 

[sanych]

The thread is "Help with AHA-2940...", not the general SCSI controllers. All 2940 series Adaptec controllers have Adaptec SCSISelect Utility in BIOS, that is activated by Ctrl-A during boot time. There are two options: "Configure/View Host Adapter Settings" and "SCSI Disk Utilities". In "Confiure/View" there are "SCSI Bus Interface Definitions" and "Additional Options". The latter includes menu items "Boot Device Options" (which I have on my 2940UW and do not see at all on 2940), "SCSI Device Configuration" and "Advanced Configuration Options".

There are no IDE devices whatsoever on the system, I am aware of this part. Both IDE controllers are disabled in MB BIOS, boot option is set to "SCSI, A, C".

Also the controller does not read the CD at boot time, which is something that 2940UW does and determines that particular CD is bootable and gives you an option to boot from it.

Tried that "Removable media on boot" thing already (the last suggestion) - nothing changes.

Anything else?

VN

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Aside from sending you an image of a DOS boot disk w/ 2940 drivers (which I have), I'll have to try some things when I get home. This has me curious as well (I have a 2940W that I pulled out of a P90)

 

[Demon-Xanth]

The 2940 (no letter) does not support the bootable format on the NT 4.0 bootable CD.

My guess is that the Win98 and Win2k CDs are in the same boat.