Need some SCSI/IDE help

[speed01]

How would one get a machine to boot from SCSI and still be able to use an IDE drive when there is no provision for booting from SCSI in the bios?? I have a pc with 7 SCSI drives which I want to install an 80g IDE drive into but it refuses to boot with the IDE drive attached. Any ideas??

Thanks,
Speed

 

[Nothinman]

Don't detect the IDE drive in the BIOS, any decent OS will talk to the IDE controller directly and it won't matter.

 

[speed01]

Tried that, using W2K/AS and an Adaptec 29160 controller.....no go.. I was thinking the same thing as well so I tried it before I made this post. I also tried setting the IDE drive to secondary master, primary and secondary slave, auto detect and not recognise the IDE drive at all(IDE off), the last is the only way the machine will boot (even with a bootable CD in the SCSI CD drive). I'm pretty much out of ideas here. The only other thing I could try is to put a second IDE controller in but I doubt that would make a difference as it would still pick up the IDE as primary.....Granted, this is a pieced together system based on a Dell PIII board but I don't see how that would make a difference (it's also been tried on an Abit KR7A133-Raid board with the same results).

Maybe I should have tried LINUX again.......

 

[speed01]

I just though of something, do you think that if a put in an IDE controller, it would pick up the SCSI bios first and boot from it and then the OS would trigger the IDE controller thereby making my previous assumption about the add on IDE controller incorrect??

 

[Peter]

Your system BIOS must be giving you a choice - either you have an explicit "SCSI first" entry in the boot order, or, in a modern BIOS, you have "BBS" services. In the latter method, the add-on card's BIOS will register the drives it found with system BIOS, and the latter then gives you a menu to choose from which one of these to boot from.

With a system BIOS old enough to not give you any of the above, you're lost. Note that you MUST let system BIOS detect your IDE stuff, else the PCI-IDE bridge chip doesn't get set up to use the appropriate PIO and DMA modes.

regards, Peter

 

[bacillus]

not sure that this may help buy try making the whole of the ide hdd an extended partition thereby making it unbootable!