A7N8X Deluxe SATA boot issue

  • Thread starter Thread starter WDG
  • Start date Start date
W

WDG

Listonians--
I just installed WinXP Pro on a Seagate SATA drive (c:\)
and I'm now trying to restore my legacy drives to the system.

The system sees the IDE drives D: and E:, but when I try to
add a drive back using a Maxtor Promise Ultra133 TX2
PCI IDE Controller (recognized as a scsi controller), my
system refuses to boot, saying that NTLR is missing.

I'm out of IDE connections on the mobo, the second IDE
is filled with my CDROM and a LS120. It appears that the
mobo is having trouble resolving the boot device, looking at
the Maxtor Promise Ultra133 card as the boot device
instead of the SATA. Without a drive attached to the
Ultra133, the system boots fine, with the drive attached,
no go.

Similar things happen when I put my Adaptec SCSI card
and SCSI drive back into the picture.

Any way to force the Silicon Image to be the first SCSI
device in the boot sequence?

Thanks,
Doug
 
I am having similar problem with a Promise SX4000 Raid controller...
Everything works fine (A7N8X rocks!) until I install the Promise. My
particular error is something about NTOSKRNL being corrupt, though it isn't,
since everything starts working immediately after removing the Promise card.
This really sucks, since I have 800gb of customer data in a RAID array on
that card...

I have an email in to Promise tech support, hopefully they'll reply sometime
soon. If I find a solution, I'll post it here.

Gary
 
"Gary Ellington" said:
I am having similar problem with a Promise SX4000 Raid controller...
Everything works fine (A7N8X rocks!) until I install the Promise. My
particular error is something about NTOSKRNL being corrupt, though it isn't,
since everything starts working immediately after removing the Promise card.
This really sucks, since I have 800gb of customer data in a RAID array on
that card...

I have an email in to Promise tech support, hopefully they'll reply sometime
soon. If I find a solution, I'll post it here.

Gary
Click to expand...

The load order is influenced by PCI address select. Within the PCI slots,
for example, the slots nearer the processor are loaded before the slots
farther from the processor. However, the SATA cannot be moved, and unless
Asus was a bit clever in selecting PCI address decodes, you probably cannot
beat the problem by moving the card. The only way to know, would be if you
could find a utility that knows the physical_address of the SIIG chip and
of a card in a PCI slot (if you know the address map, then you can figure
out whether moving the card will help or not).

Some BIOS have more options for boot devices, and I think someone
mentioned selecting boot from "INTxx" was a way to distinguish devices.
But the A7N8X doesn't have such an option.

If the SIIG chip had drivers that made the SIIG look like IDE, that
would be another way to fix it, but then there would be resource conflicts
between the builtin PATA interfaces and the SIIG.

Would it help if you had some kind of multiboot thing installed on the
device you don't want to boot from, which would redirect the boot process
to the device you do want to boot from ? I don't know all the details,
but maybe that will give the system a stub to keep it happy during boot.

HTH,
Paul
 
Nope, no such bios setting on the A7N8X, and no jumper relating to the
onboard IDE either...

Promise seems to be ignoring my email also... I wonder if Newegg will take
this board back....
 
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