Soyo Dragon+ and SCSI card, can't load OS

[mooseAndSquirrel]

I wish there was (or I could find) and "official soyo dragon plus" thread. Here's my problem:

I want to use a SCSI boot drive attached to an adaptec U160 card (29160N).

I have:
The 2ba1 BIOS
A 400W Antec power supply
A CDRW attached to IDE1
A CDRW attached to IDE2
IDE 3 and 4 are currently empty
The Jumper set to plain IDE (not RAID)
The BIOS set to boot first from CD then from SCSI
The BIOS set to disable the on-board RAID controller
I currently have the SCSI card in PCI #1 (the on board RAID controller shares an IRQ with PCI #2)
The SCSI drive is attached and properly terminated
I've tried the SCSI card in other slots

When I boot:
I post, my cpu temps are upper 20's lower 30's
I can twiddle the BIOS
I can control-A into the Adaptec SCSI BIOS, see, test and format the drive
Then I boot from CD, either Windows 2000 or XP (same thing happens with either)
During the load of XP, it sees the SCSI drive, allows me to format and partition it
I have tried either loading the Promise RAID drivers during install or not
I have tried loading the Adaptec drivers during install or not (XP claims it has a newer driver anyway)
The install starts and a bunch of files are copied
Eventually during the file copy, the install just hangs (often this is at 27% with drivers.cab, but it does vary)

I realize (I think) that there's some compatability problem between the SCSI card and the Soyo RAID IDE, but no matter what I try, it hangs during the install.

Does anyone have a similar setup (SCSI boot on a Soyo D+) that could tell me there configuration and what you did to make the !$#!#@ O/S install?

 

[kursplat]

are you installing with all your drives and scsi installed? if so try with just the main hd and vid card nothin else. also pci slot 1 shares with the agp slot, probably not good for the scsi card.

good luck

soyo dragon+
athlon 1500+ @1500 mhz (10x150 fsb)
using the onboard sound and nic
gforce 2 mx400
384 mb ddr sdram
voltage-1.75

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

Just to close the thread I started ...

I ended up just using the 2 regular IDE channels on the Soyo D+ and master/slaving my 4 devices. I then can use my adaptec card and cheetah drive.

I'm not happy, but at least the system is working. The D+ hasn't been so great for me: something wrong with RAID, the VIA chipset which everyone is pissing on now, and I can only use 2 of the 3 memory slots - put all three in and instant instability.

I'll run this for a year and then next Christmas break I'll go with some other motherboard, memory and ram configuration that will hopefully allow me to RAID 0 some drives.

 

[Skooch]

Don't take this question the wrong way, but I have to ask. Why in the world if you only have one SCSI drive would you go through the hassle of adding a SCSI card into a machine when you can buy two fast IDE drives in this day and age and RAID them together, and be as fast, or faster in real world operations than a single SCSI drive? Three years ago I thought SCSI was good, but if you look at storagereview's website, unless someone's running a big database with many users, or adding multiple drives to a machine I think current IDE kicks SCSI's butt for price to performance. I still use the fastest SCSI drives in servers at work so I have the newest tech to compare it with.

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

It's a reasonable question. I had the SCSI card, anyway. So I decided on a 15K drive for my os and apps. If I had it to do over again (and I suppose I will in about 12 months when the upgrade itch hits again) I'd probably do what you said and get a high end RAID controller with lots of cache and some cheaper drives. But in a way I was lucky this time, because I couldn't get the Soyo on-board RAID to work for me. Unfortunately my adaptec card doesn't do SCSI raid, but imagine how that would smoke!