sata and pci raid conflict.

[trak0rr0kart]

My mobo is a nforce2 delux asus. I have tried setting it to just boot to scsi in the bios, but since they are both considered scsi to the bios (I think), it doesn't work out. I have tried going into onboard config to enable sata to be the first booting device, but I don't see an option to make sata the main guy. If it is between my ide (non raid) slots on my motherboard and my sata, then it works. But since I'm adding this ide raid pci card into the machine, it has taken control and not allowed me to boot my sata raid (stipe 0; raptors).

I have tried to manually set my two 80 gigs, that I am wanting on this new ide pci raid card, to device 2 and 3, but one of them always is 0; could this be the problem?

Both chips, onboard and on the pci card, are silicon image.


Any suggestions out there?

thankyou in advance,

Trak0r.

 

[mechBgon]

Onboard PCI controllers strike again...

This would ideally be something you can change in the BIOS, yes. Next suggestions: first, try the PCI IDE RAID card in PCI slot 4, and then in PCI slot 5 (5 is the bottom one). Depending on "where" the onboard SATA RAID controller is on the PCI bus, this might get it spotted first and then you could boot from it as usual. If that doesn't work, try manually assigning the highest IRQ possible to the PCI slot where your IDE RAID card is located (I might have an incorrect concept going here, but it's simple to try it).

Next-cleanest solution is to get a plug-in PCI SATA RAID controller, put it physically above the PCI IDE RAID controller so it gets spotted first when the PCI bus is scanned, and reinstall Windows after reestablishing your RAID0 array on this new controller. Hope that helps

 

[trak0rr0kart]

Thanks for the advice, I will try moving it around on the bus, and pray it gets spotted first

I'll get back to you on this.

Thanks,

trak0r

 

[mechBgon]

I'll be interested to hear what happens (or doesn't!) Good luck!

 

[trak0rr0kart]

I tried everything suggested and tried a few more things like making the drives without any formating or partioning... nothing was working....


The only way I found was to install windows with both raids in the computer and functioning as raids, and then install windows. When that happens the windows will write the boot.ini and few other files to direct the computer to boot off the sata. at least it is a partial solution for now. I really don't want to leave it this way because if I need to take a drive out or something or change the way the raid is... then I have a chance to loose the boot config information etc (doesn't seem like a good practice to me).

-trak0r