Need help booting to an old SCSI drive/card...

[CZroe]

Basically, I'm in one of those "You touched it and now it doesn't work" situations.

The CMOS was cleared on the motherboard (Not PnP compliant). I manually specified the IRQ and got the SCSI adapter to say "BIOS Installed" and it detects the drive. The SCSI card's BIOS also says that the drive is error-free. But the system WILL NOT BOOT to the drive. I booted to a DOS diskette and FDISK tells me that there are no fixed disk drives.

I pulled up the PDF at Adaptec's site and it mentions a BIOS option that this card does not have:

Note: If you plan to boot your computer from
a SCSI device attached to the AHA-2940/
2940W, set the Boot Target ID setting in the
SCSISelect utility to correspond to the SCSI
ID of the device you are booting from (see
Configuring the Host Adapter on page 8).

There is no "Boot Target ID" option ANYWHERE. There is a "Send Start Unit Command" for each channel but I have tried setting it to "Yes" for the drive's channel and it doesn't help.

When booting, the SCSI card's BIOS is displayed and says that the drive was detected and is "Drive C: (80h)" but the system still does not boot...

I still get "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

Help?

 

[cremator]

Bump (I'm his friend and we're trying to resolve the issue still)

 

[cremator]

If you enter the SCSISelect Utility and enter the Boot SCSI ID option does not display, the root of this issue is within the motherboard BIOS and not with the Adaptec SCSI Card.

This is a new feature within of the motherboard CMOS setup that, should have a BIOS boot selector which allows the selection of which hard disks selection to boot from by the SCSI ID number and brand name within the CMOS of the motherboard.

The boot device selector in SCSISelect has been disabled by the motherboard, as the Motherboard BIOS Boot selector (BBS) overrides the Adaptec SCSI Card feature.

This is not a problem, and the boot drive selection has to be made within the Motherboard bios, and not in the 29160 bios configuration utility.

Just found that, anyone know what to look for in the bios to change that? I've had no luck yet.

 

[cremator]

Still looking for a solution, nothing working yet.

 

[odog]

since it all started when you cleared the cmos on the mobo revert to the setting the 2940 had previous to you messing with it. go into the computers bios and check the boot order there. i would suspect the boot order is like floppy-->ide0-->cdrom. change it to floppy-->scsi-->ide0

 

[cremator]

The BIOS has no options like that. It's a 1994 bios, and the boot order only allows you to change it to A,C or C,A. No other options, period. And I called Adaptec, they wanted 65$ to give me technical support due to the date of the card. So I'm really lost for what to do now.

 

[Markfw]

I'm at work now, so I can't tell you exactly, but on the adaptec bios, there is a choice to load bios, and boot, etc... And this usually only works if the hard drive is set to ID 0 (on older cards).

Do you see a message "bios loaded" when the SCSI card bios displays during startup ? If not thats the first place to check.

 

[cremator]

Yes, the adaptec card loads the bios, and even said "BIOS Installed Sucessfully!" then it shows the harddrive information, similar to this HARDDRIVENAME HARDDRIVEMODEL id(0) 80h. But then it goes to a screen and says to insert a bootdisk or something, I guess it cant see a harddrive at all so its trying to boot from floppy. The adaptec scsiselect utility shows the drive, and I can scan it and it has no problems. But the actual motherboard bios somehow isn't booting to scsi.

 

[cremator]

bump

 

[cremator]

sorry to keep bumping, but someone must have had this problem or similar in the past

 

[Pariah]

Is there anything on the SCSI drive? If can't find the OS on the drive, it doesn't matter if the drive is detected or not, you'll still get the insert boot floppy message. On systems that old, you probably have to manually load the SCSI card drivers when booting to DOS. If you don't, nothing in DOS will see the drive.

 

[cremator]

As far as I know, Windows 95 is on there. Basically I was adding a CDROM to the pc, and I removed the cmos battery because the bios was passworded and we didn't know the password. After that, I'll assume it erased all of the previous settings, now it won't boot at all. I guess it *could* be corrupted, but there is no way to find out, fdisk doesn't even see any disk.

 

[Polishwonder74]

Hey, I'm in a similar situation with a customer's computer right now. Is your headache-- I mean computer a Compaq? I'm stuck in Compaq BIOS hell. It's not a real BIOS, it's one of those fruity 'hidden partition' jobs, and I'm not sure if I'll ever get it going again. My client is gonna be pissed.

what a cluster fvck. Can anyone throw us a clue here? We're drowning.

 

[cremator]

I'm honestly not sure if it's a prebuilt system. I believe it was a custom job back in the early 90's. The case is just a generic AT. But yeah, this is very annoying indeed, especially considering Adaptec asked me to pay 65$ for tech support on the SCSI Host Card, the whole PC isn't worth any penny of 65$.

 

[Pariah]

Download the drive diagnostic utilities from the manufacturer's website. IBM/Hitachi for example has a self-booting floppy posted that will boot PCDOS with the proper SCSI card driver and verifies the integrity of the drive. If it won't boot your PC and allow access to the drive, then something is seriously wrong.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Polishwonder74
Hey, I'm in a similar situation with a customer's computer right now. Is your headache-- I mean computer a Compaq? I'm stuck in Compaq BIOS hell. It's not a real BIOS, it's one of those fruity 'hidden partition' jobs, and I'm not sure if I'll ever get it going again. My client is gonna be pissed.

what a cluster fvck. Can anyone throw us a clue here? We're drowning.

Oh man, you're in for it now. I hope that you still have the original HD around somewhere, because the actual BIOS setup program, resides on that hidden partition, not in the ROM. If not, then you will have to find a copy of the "restore media" or whateve Compaq calls it, to set up the system "fresh" onto a new HD. You used to be able to download those, hopefully you still can.

 

[VirtualLarry]

When the system used to be running properly, did it boot off of the SCSI HD, connected to the SCSI controller in question? There were no other IDE or other HDs in the system?

Here's what you need to boot off of a SCSI HD, normally.

You need a SCSI card, *with* BIOS.

It appears you have that, and that the card's BIOS does come up. (Does it say "Hit CTRL-A for SCSISelect?" when booting?)

I would have suggested that perhaps you might need to re-adjust any BIOS settings for memory shadowing, or possibly "memory hole", since removing the battery cleared the CMOS. However the fact that the SCSI BIOS displays, would seem to indicate that this is not an issue.

You need a SCSI HD. Older cards, require a bootable HD to be set to SCSI ID number zero. Newer cards, allow you to choose the SCSI ID of the primary bootable drive. I still set the HD to ID zero anyways, because some OSes also make that assumption.

Also make sure that the cabling, SCSI termination, etc., is set up correctly. Also make sure that you have the SCSI HD's "sector size" jumper set correctly, it should be "512 bytes per sector", for PC-compatibility. Not all HDs will have a jumper for something like that.

As far as I can see, this is all good so far, because the SCSI BIOS displays the HD, and prints a message about "C:" and 80h (80h is the first BIOS disk number allocation - aka the first HD in the system that the BIOS sees).

But you claim that at this point, you get "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER".

That's what the system BIOS displays, when it checks the first bootable HD, and cannot find a proper master boot record signature. Basically, it seems to think that the drive isn't partitioned/formatted.

Now, if you want to partition/format it, some SCSI host adaptors and HDs, cannot be formatted in DOS using FDISK, you need to download their specific SCSI format tools and software. There should be some available for Adaptec AHA2940 cards, probably on Adaptec's site. (They are only one of the most popular SCSI controller cards ever, after all.)

 

[Sideswipe001]

I tend to agree with VirtualLarry here. Are you positive that it even had an OS? You couldn't get past the BIOS password. Was there anything ON the computer that needed to be saved? If not, why not just re-install the OS and see if it finds the drive? Forget FDISK. Get a Windows 2000/XP cd and boot from it. They have pre-loaded drivers for that SCSI card, and if the HD works, they will see it and give you the option to install to it.

 

[cremator]

Install the SCSI drivers or xp? It's a 66mhz pc, so I doubt anything over 98 is even an option. I'm positive Win95 was on there, and It booted fine, it just I couldn't enter the bios because it required a password, so I removed the cmos battery.

 

[cremator]

YAY!!! I finally got it to work, I'm, not exactly sure what I did. I turned on all of the memory shadowing, and I found an option hidden that said INT C USING IRQ so I changed it to the same irq as the scsi card!!! Thanks all!1

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: cremator
YAY!!! I finally got it to work, I'm, not exactly sure what I did. I turned on all of the memory shadowing, and I found an option hidden that said INT C USING IRQ so I changed it to the same irq as the scsi card!!! Thanks all!1

Congratulations! I'm not sure why that would make it work either, but I'm glad that you got it working.

One thing that I failed to inquire about, was whether the card was ISA or PCI. I was assuming ISA, but if this was an older non-Pnp PCI motherboard, then yes, you usually need to manually enable an IRQ for the PCI slot, and enable Bus Mastering for that slot as well. I had an old, old, Socket5 Pentium-75 machine with a Phoenix BIOS that had that issue. Maybe that is what you were talking about?

 

[cremator]

It was a PCI SCSI card, after posting that message, I realized the root of the problem was a bad cmos battery (lost the settings again). I changed each device to IRQ 10, made A, B, C, and D int using IRQ 10, and enabled some "NCR" bios, which later I found was some sort of scsi driver. It could have conflicts, but it's not my pc, and the people who use it only use it for solitare, so it works fine for that purpose.

 

[CZroe]

Yeah, we figured out early on to enable the IRQ for the specific PCI slot manually. That's when we first started getting the "SCSI BIOS Installed" message but the option for selectin the boot device was not in the SCSISelect utility like the manual says.

These people may only play Solitaire on it but they gush about how much their computer is worth and what a deal they got on it and how they need *IT AND ONLY IT* because they don't want to lose a single game. We owed them a favor and it would be really bad if we not only couldn't return it but ended up destroying their "precious" PC.

I got really busy, so I apologize for not returning to the thread earlier. I guess a SCSI card needs to have BIOS shadowing enabled so it can modify the system BIOS in memory to point to it for booting or something and this is why there's no "boot to SCSI" option in the CMOS setup. It probably shouldn't even say "BIOS installed" if it can't get that far.

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: Polishwonder74
Hey, I'm in a similar situation with a customer's computer right now. Is your headache-- I mean computer a Compaq? I'm stuck in Compaq BIOS hell. It's not a real BIOS, it's one of those fruity 'hidden partition' jobs, and I'm not sure if I'll ever get it going again. My client is gonna be pissed.

what a cluster fvck. Can anyone throw us a clue here? We're drowning.

Oh man, you're in for it now. I hope that you still have the original HD around somewhere, because the actual BIOS setup program, resides on that hidden partition, not in the ROM. If not, then you will have to find a copy of the "restore media" or whateve Compaq calls it, to set up the system "fresh" onto a new HD. You used to be able to download those, hopefully you still can.

I agree. Encountering one of those systems is so traumatizing that I was just telling cremator that he'd better be glad that we weren't "messing with one of those Compaqs with a BIOS on the HDD". This conversation happened before I started this thread (Yep, swear to God) Good luck with that Polishwonder74! I can't help much as I've only heard the horror stories of that INSANE engineering decision.