Semi Complex RAID Question???

[6800 Ultra]

Long time reader, first time poster!

Ok, for those out there who are more familiar with Raid setups.... Here it goes.

I am building a rig for a friend, he has a P4C800-E Deluxe with (2) WD 74g Rators on the Promise Fast Track Controller - RAID 0. With XP SP1 installed and running fine. Now the issue. I'm tring to install a
PCI Highpoint Rocketraid 1540. With (4) WD SATA 200gig in a JBOD array. The card recognises the drives, and I can build an array in the Highpoint Bios. Theres no option to NOT to boot off of the Highpoint array in the HIGHPOINT bios. I do not want to boot off of the JBOD array, just want raw storage. Once the boot sequence goes past the Highpoint array detection, the screen just stays black. I cannot get into the ASUS bios, because AFTER i hit DEL to enter setup, the raid cards are scanned BEFORE you ernter BIOS. And as I stated before, as soon as you pass the Highpoint bios, black screen after the PCI card bios HDA detection.

If you unplug the (4) HD's off of the PCI raid card (leaving the PCI card installed), the coomputer will boot up fine off of the Promise Raptor array. XP will find the RocketRaid PCI card, and I successfully load the drivers. Now if you connect the drives again, same thing.... Cannot boot up off of the promise array, and cannot get into ASUS bios... Just a black screen.

ANY IDEAS??? I disabled Motherboard level PnP as XP is more dynamic and can alleviate conflicts on the memory address level. But this did not make a difference.

THANKS FOR ANY IDEAS YOU MIGHT HAVE!!!

EDIT: Not that it matters, but the machines other specs are below:
3.4EE
P4C800-E Deluxe
4gig of PC3200 Crosair XXL
Leadtek 6800 GT

 

[Steve]

Too many boot ROMs, you can only have up to 128KB worth. Mass storage controllers generally use up to 64KB at boot (though they then shrink down at runtime depending on found devices). So the two of those plus your video card means you're out of luck. Any bootable LAN/USB/etc. will also eat into this space.

 

[6800 Ultra]

Wow, that sucks.... Its a total S.O.L. situation?? I belive what your saying, cuz unfortunaly it does make sense..... But no one else has this configuration working PCI raid, onboard raid, and AGP Bios?

 

[Steve]

It is an S.O.L. situation, especially with nVidia's growing ROM sizes (the GF440MX tends to use up to 63KB during runtime, for example). You can try disabling as much boot functionality as these devices will allow, otherwise you'll need a second box to run all that equipment on.

 

[besplin]

I have a similar problem when trying to add a Silicon Image 0680 PCI RAID (IDE) card to my system. When it boots the screen goes black--right where it should be going to Windows XP Pro. I have tried the card in another machine and it works just fine.

How do I tell how much boot ROM is being used by what devices? Where did the 128K limit come from? Any help would be appreciated. Here's my basic setup:

AMD Barton 2500+ chip
MSI K7N2 motherboard
GeForce 5200 AGP card (128MB video RAM)
one PCI slot running a USB 2.0 card, 4 free PCI slots
1 GB RAM
1 200 GB Seagate Baracuda Drive on motherboard primary master
1 DVD Burner on motherboard secondary master

Trying to install "For Best Ports" PCI IDE RAID card that has
Silicon Image 0680 chip in it. Trying to hook up 2nd 200 GB Seagate
drive for Mirroring purposed.

Thanks

 

[Steve]

Microsoft has a DOS diagnostic tool called MSD.EXE which I haven't used, but you're welcome to try. It reads the UMB (Upper Memory Block). Here are some sample results from other people at a different forum doing the same thing:

ROM BIOS - 65536
Option ROM - 32768
Video ROM BIOS - 64512

The 32K thing is the netboot ROM I suppose (use Utilities-Memory Browser, and press Enter on a listed item to see some strings from inside it).

C0000 VGA, 52KB
CD000 SCSI, 16 KB
D1000 LAN, 32 KB

Which means that the SCSI card (in slot 1 btw) does get enumerated before the onboard LAN - else the SCSI ROM wouldn't be on a lower address.

F000 ECS BIOS, 65536
D000 Option ROM, 32768 (LAN)
CC00 Option ROM, 16384 (SCSI)
C000 Video ROM, 49152

a PCI or AGP ROM image is allowed to be up to 64 KBytes ... but after firing its chip up, it is supposed to ditch the initialization code and shrink to whatever is needed at runtime - as demonstrated by LSI's SCSI BIOS, which is 64 KBytes initially but shrinks to 2-16 KBytes for runtime, depending on what kind of devices it found.

nVidia's VGA BIOS ROM currently seems to be at 62-63 KBytes _runtime_ size, which isn't beyond any specification - it's just extremely impolite toward the non-VGA cards that come after it. Given the popularity of LAN boot, PCI IDE and SCSI controllers and soon bootable FireWire cards, this is asking for trouble.

Here's the thread: http://www.sysopt.com/forum/sh...s=&threadid=123529

besplin, you can try putting the card in a different slot, as well as updated BIOS and drivers from www.siig.com