SCSI master boot record question

[TeflonMan1]

Hi the deal is i had a dual boot with the SCSI booting to 98 and an IDE for 2000. I was using boot magic installed on the win 98 drive. I recently bought a KT7A and it hosed me OS. I reinstall windows 98 and it works fine then i flash to a new bios and the flash is successful but i cant load windows at all. I try to reinstall but it cant boot up to it either when its doing setup. So i try doing it on the IDE drive and it works fine so i installed 98 and then upgraded to 2000 still using FAT32. The scsi card and windows still sees just one scsi drive but fdisk sees 2 scsi drives for some wierd reason. then when im about to do a mirror transfer of windows to the scsi and norton ghost sees 2 scsi drives. my question is could this be because boot magic is still in the master boot record screwing things up? If so would a low level format be recommended for clearing out the boot record? I have tried both an adaptec 2940uw and 2940u2 and they both see just one drive. Any advice on what it could be or how to clear the mbr would be appreciated.

 

[KGB]

Which BIOS did you flash: Abit or Adaptec?

 

[TeflonMan1]

I flashed the abit bios only. the wierd thing is that after the bios flash when the scsi card detects the hd it says bios successfully upgraded! and ive tried another scsi card and it still says the same thing

 

[tlemmon]

I think it is something in the MBR.... I have a soft-low level routine that is run by using debug.exe. This program will wipe clean the MBR and may help you out. It isnt the same as the low level format you would run using the Adaptec Utilities in the SCSI card bios. Just keep in mind that it will wipe everything out, so have a backup handy! Let me know if you would like to try it.


-t

 

[mastertech01]

The SCSI detection prolly actually says BIOS sucessfully Installed, which simply means it detected a bootable SCSI hard drive. When you flashed the Abit bios did you reset all the perameters, such as boot sequence to boot to SCSI? And you cant have a bootable OS on the IDE and SCSI controller at the same time and be able to boot to the SCSI controller unless you have a boot loader installed to direct it to the SCSI controller.

 

[sleefer]

mastertech01 is correct about the boot loader. When you tried to reinstall win98 it probably disabled the boot loader even though it is still there.

 

[TeflonMan1]

so since the SCSI drive is just sitting there unformatted i have nothing to loose by clearing out the MBR? And initially i didnt clear out the parameters but i did later and SCSI is set to boot before the IDE. I guess i could try the utility to clear out the MBR. If you know the name of it, where to get it, or have it handy just email it to me here.Thanks a bunch for your help guys.

 

[mastertech01]

What you arent understanding here is that the system sees ATA66/100 controllers as SCSI, so when you select to boot to SCSI it goes for the first SCSI controller it sees, which always is the onboard controller. You will have to reinstall the bootloader

 

[TeflonMan1]

So i need to reinstall boot magic and then unistall it? I used to have boot magic and the windows 200 boot up software. both of those i assume are gone now and im just running 2000

 

[sleefer]

If the scsi drive is not formatted, delete all the partitions and recreate the partition you need. You shouldn't need to low-level format unless you can't delete the small partition that Bootmagic created. If you are trying to install Win98 after Win2k it is not going to work if Win98 can see your Win2k installation, that is where Bootmagic comes in, but only after Win98 is installed. The easiest thing to do would be to format both drives, reinstall Win98 and then install Win2k. Do not choose upgrade, and Win2k installation will do the rest. You won't need Bootmagic anymore and you can install Win2k on the d drive if you want just make sure that it is partitioned.

 

[TeflonMan1]

yeah the scsi drive that used to have 98 on it has an 8 meg partition that i cant seem to get rid of with partition magic. im guessing that 8 meg partion is causing fdisk to see 2 drives

 

[jhouston]

I was hoping someone else was having problems with an ABIT bios flash and a Adaptec scsi card. I just flashed my 2940U2W SCSI ADAPTER with the latest bios and and everything was fine. I booted into WIN98SE and then rebooted to flash my MB's BIOS to BH6_SS and after successfully flashing and resetting my bios settings(maybe not though!) I am also currently stalled at the "scsi bios successfully installed!" section of the boot process. Shall I clear the CMOS or does my bios setting need tweaking? Or should I flash to another bios version? By the way, I have read more than a few posts but I may have overlooked some of the others so any comments suggesting I should search for my answer would be understandable but grossly inaccurate.