Trouble installing Windows with new SCSI drive and controller

[darkember]

Hey guys, this is my first post here, and I figured that you guys would most likely to be the best people to ask... So... I've been having some problems here the past few days.

I just bought a new 15k.3 and an LSI SYM21040 U160 controller, and I'm having touble getting everything to work right. I have a kt7a-raid motherboard, but I have the raid disabled at the moment, in case there was some conflicts with the scsi card.

The board sees the card fine, and I can open up the SCSI BIOS and see my 15k.3, and do a low level format, etc. so I know the card is communicating with the drive. So, I boot off of my win2k cd, install teh third party drivers to use the drive to install to, and setup installs its first slew of files to the drive. Its then supposed to restart, boot off of the drive, and continue setup. However, it just boots right back into setup on the cd, and starts all over again. I have the BIOS on my mobo set to boot off of CD, then SCSI, then HDD-0 (which i dont have any ide hard disks hooked up at the moment anyway). So, if i choose the scsi device to boot first, it just tells me "PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT" like there isn't a drive with an OS on it at all. I can also go into the BIOS on my LSI card, and choose which channels I want to enable/disable, and boot/not boot from. So, I have both channels enabled, and if I select the channel that the drive is on, it give me the "PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT" business again, and if I don't set it to boot from that channel, then it just always boots off of the cd.

The drive is set to SCSI id0, which is what the card tells me it wants for a boot device, as long as I'm interpreting that right. The cable is terminated fine externally, and auto terminated at the controller. I've also tried different positions on the cable, and different PCI slots. So... I'm basically all out of ideas. Any suggestions you guys have will be *MUCH* appreciated! Thanks!

 

[mechBgon]

I had a look at ABit's site, and they had a remark that sounded like it might help (link). Basically, they suggest setting the boot order to:

1. CD-ROM
2. ATA100 RAID
3. SCSI

if you're installing off an IDE CD-ROM drive. That's aimed at Adaptec 29160 owners, but you never know.

Otherwise, it seems like either the board isn't correctly trying to boot from the SCSI card at all, or else the SCSI card is not attempting to boot from the HDD. What happens if you set SCSI as the first and *only* boot option and disable all the rest?

I hate to be pessimistic, but the lackluster PCI performance of VIA boards is likely to really put the brakes on Mr. Cheetah there. If you can afford $70 for an upgrade to an Asus A7N266-VM, they have excellent PCI performance and some other nice goodies, although they're not cutting-edge compared to, say, an A7N8X-Deluxe. I bailed my KT333-based board for the A7N266-VM after benchmarking my SCSI card at 72mb/sec on KT333 and 120Mb/sec on nForce.

 

[darkember]

Yeah, i know about the PCI bottleneck. it will still be better than my current ide drives. I was also more just buying this now for my next comptuer that I build in teh semi-near future, jsut so I dont ahve to front it all at once.

Also, its not just a 70 dollar upgrade, cause I would have to buy ddr ram too. I'm on old skool stuff here!

If i set scsi to the only boot option after the setup install, it just tells me to press a key to reboot.

I tried changing the boot order like ABIT said to, but that didn't work either. It installed just how it did before, and then booted off of the cd. I then restarted with the boot order ATA100RAID, SCSI, then CDROM, and I just got Press any key to Reboot.

 

[mechBgon]

And the LSI is definitely set up to boot from ID 0 on the correct channel? Do you see the LSI BIOS enumerating the ID's and recognizing the drive, before you get dumped to the PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT message?

I'll rummage through the ABit manual and see if I see anything worth trying...

 

[mechBgon]

Hmmkay... if Boot Other Device is disabled, you might try enabling it (or vice versa). Also, looking at the IRQ arrangements, it looks like PCI slots 2 & 3 share an IRQ, but only with eachother, so I'd put the SCSI card in one of those slots and leave the other vacant, if it isn't already in one of them.

You might even re-enable the ATA100 RAID just for kicks, and see if the board goes ---> :Q! and somehow gets its act together. Good luck!

 

[darkember]

Well, heres the thing. When I set the LSI card to boot from that channel, it tells me to press any key...
and won't even start up off of a cd or anything. When I do have it set though, yes, I see it going through all of the scsi id's and recognizing the cheetah.

I think I tried it both ways with the Boot Other Device as well, but I'll try that again when I get home tonight. I don't actually remember off the top of my head which PCI slot its in, but i think its possible that I have it in slot 2, with an ethernet card in slot 3, so that might be causing the problem there. I'll definitely look at both of those when I get home today. Thanks for the suggesstions man!

 

[darkember]

Ok, well, it looks like i finally got it working! The LSI controller didn't seem to like my motherboard's bios it had on there, so I flashed it with a different one, and it seems to be working great so far! Thanks for the help guys!

 

[mechBgon]

Sweet! Enjoy your zippy new drive!