ASROCK K7S8X AND Iinstalling RAID Card

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ratty Burger
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Ratty Burger

Hi,

I have a K7S8x motherboard, and I want to install a pair of hard disks in
RAID format. I have installed a Innovision DM-8401R PCI card, and have
setup a pair of hard drives in a raid format. I then tried to install
Widows XP Pro, and everything is going well until the system tries to
reboot, as the raid card and it's hard disks are not visible within the IOS
as a boot option. The motherboard came with version 2.20 of the BIOS, and
I have upgrade to the latest version, 2.50, but I don't see anyplace to
change the boot order to use the RAID card first. I have set the option to
try other boot devices to yes, but all i get is the option for the floppy
or DVD drive, all hard disks are attached to the RAID card

Many thanks
 
Ratty Burger said:
Hi,

I have a K7S8x motherboard, and I want to install a pair of hard disks in
RAID format. I have installed a Innovision DM-8401R PCI card, and have
setup a pair of hard drives in a raid format. I then tried to install
Widows XP Pro, and everything is going well until the system tries to
reboot, as the raid card and it's hard disks are not visible within the IOS
as a boot option. The motherboard came with version 2.20 of the BIOS, and
I have upgrade to the latest version, 2.50, but I don't see anyplace to
change the boot order to use the RAID card first. I have set the option to
try other boot devices to yes, but all i get is the option for the floppy
or DVD drive, all hard disks are attached to the RAID card

Many thanks
Click to expand...

http://www.ivmm.com/eio/products_dm8401r.html

Uses ITE IT8212F RAID controller. (This is the same controller used
on some of the latest Asus motherboards as a bundled controller. Perhaps
on the Athlon64 motherboards ?)

The PCI Card will have a controller BIOS on it, to run the card as
a RAID controller, or as a vanilla PCI IDE controller. There are two
download sections on this page:

http://www.iteusa.com/productInfo/Download.html

For the product to be recognized, the RAID BIOS firmware on the
PCI card, has to be loaded by the Asrock BIOS. You should see something
like this on the BIOS screen, if the IT8212 BIOS is running:

"IT8212 RAID BIOS V1.7.1.91 F/W Ver 02093030
Copyright 2002-2004 ITE, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Please wait for IDE scan..
Drive 0: <whatever drive is connected there> <which array it is in>
Drive 1: <whatever drive is connected there> <which array it is in>
Drive 2: <whatever drive is connected there> <which array it is in>
Drive 3: <whatever drive is connected there> <which array it is in>

Press <Ctrl-F> or <Ctrl-E> to enter Setup Utility... etc."

If you aren't seeing this, then AFAIK the necessary services won't
be there for the BIOS, so you won't be able to boot from the card.
It is possible you can still use the connected drives as a data array,
by installing the Windows driver, after Windows is booted. If that
doesn't work, it implies a PCI incompatibility, even though ITE claims
the chip is PCI 2.2 compatible.

The conventional wisdom from forums.2cpu.com, is to disable any other
controllers that load their own BIOS code, on the chance that two
controllers together are asking for too much of the low 640K memory
at boot time. I have no idea what hardware is on a K7S8X that might
be conflicting, but perhaps that will give you an idea.

Apparently, some server motherboards have an option in the BIOS
with the word "EBDA" (extended BIOS data area, that chunk of 640K
used for the BIOSes) in it. The server motherboard has an alternate
arrangement of memory map for the low 640K of memory, that is supposed
to make it easier to run add-in controller BIOS. This option just
doesn't seem to exist on desktop boards.

I have a feeling, since this question is asked over and over again,
that getting third party controllers to work, is just not a priority
with motherboard makers. I'm sure there are standards somewhere as
to how it is supposed to work, and it probably wouldn't take a rocket
scientist to make a display in the BIOS to show how messed up the
allocation of memory is down in 640K country. But since SCSI chips
stopped shipping on motherboards, I think the joy of making this
type of stuff work, is gone from the minds of the motherboard makers.

While you could waste your time trying to contact Tech Support (at
either the mobo or controller companies), I doubt they'll have any
really useful suggestions as to how to get it to work.

So, easiest solution is to try to use it as a data-only array,
by installing the Windows driver.

Good luck,
Paul
 
Hi Paul

Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes I do see the message from the RAID card
BIOS that you described, and I am able to see that both Maxtor 120 GBytes
disks, connected to the PCI card via seperate IDE cables, are visible in
the message. I believe I have successfully build a RAID mirror between
the two, and whilst installing Windows XP from afresh (using F^ and a
floppy containing the RAID driver for Windows XP), the installation
routine reports that the C: drive has around 114 Gbyte of storage
available. I believe this means that the RAID BIOS is working fine, and
that the Mirror has been correctly setup. However, I only have a DVD
writer on the original IDE controllers, and the only boot devices I see
are either the floppy drive or the DVD writer. There is a setting in the
motherboard BIOS under BOOT, for other boot devices, which I have set to
Yes. I also made sure that the RAID Mirror has a little diamond symbol
next to it, which is supposed to denote that the it is to be bootable,
and I set the pair of disks as raid device 0. My problems seems to be
that the the ASROCK BIOS is not detecting the disks attached to the PCI
card as a bootable option, although the mirror itself is visible. This
means that unless bootable media is placed in either the floppy or DVD
drive, the system cannot boot. The RAID mirror is not considered a
bootable device, although the RAID mirror is available as the C: drive,
once the system has booted from either the floppy or DVD drive. I thought
this might have been fixed with the latest ASROCK motherboard BIOS, but
apparently even version 2.50 behaves the same.

I believe that there is a K7S8XE+ version of this motherboard, which has
SATA(rather than IDE) RAID built onto the motherboard. Does the BIOS on
this motherboard have an extra choice/option to make the RAID disks an
option to boot off, and if so shouldn't my setup be similar in
implementation to that provided by ASROCK. Has anyone ever got a third
party disk controller (IDE, SATA or SCSI) to work with this motherboard,
or will I have to return and give up using RAID.

Ratty

(e-mail address removed) (Paul) wrote in
 
Ratty Burger said:
Hi Paul

Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes I do see the message from the RAID card
BIOS that you described, and I am able to see that both Maxtor 120 GBytes
disks, connected to the PCI card via seperate IDE cables, are visible in
the message. I believe I have successfully build a RAID mirror between
the two, and whilst installing Windows XP from afresh (using F^ and a
floppy containing the RAID driver for Windows XP), the installation
routine reports that the C: drive has around 114 Gbyte of storage
available. I believe this means that the RAID BIOS is working fine, and
that the Mirror has been correctly setup. However, I only have a DVD
writer on the original IDE controllers, and the only boot devices I see
are either the floppy drive or the DVD writer. There is a setting in the
motherboard BIOS under BOOT, for other boot devices, which I have set to
Yes. I also made sure that the RAID Mirror has a little diamond symbol
next to it, which is supposed to denote that the it is to be bootable,
and I set the pair of disks as raid device 0. My problems seems to be
that the the ASROCK BIOS is not detecting the disks attached to the PCI
card as a bootable option, although the mirror itself is visible. This
means that unless bootable media is placed in either the floppy or DVD
drive, the system cannot boot. The RAID mirror is not considered a
bootable device, although the RAID mirror is available as the C: drive,
once the system has booted from either the floppy or DVD drive. I thought
this might have been fixed with the latest ASROCK motherboard BIOS, but
apparently even version 2.50 behaves the same.

I believe that there is a K7S8XE+ version of this motherboard, which has
SATA(rather than IDE) RAID built onto the motherboard. Does the BIOS on
this motherboard have an extra choice/option to make the RAID disks an
option to boot off, and if so shouldn't my setup be similar in
implementation to that provided by ASROCK. Has anyone ever got a third
party disk controller (IDE, SATA or SCSI) to work with this motherboard,
or will I have to return and give up using RAID.

Ratty
Click to expand...
Well, I had to put my "clue hat" on for a moment :-)

I had noticed in the AMI BIOS before, a strange option called

Interrupt 19 Capture

and the number 19 didn't mean a thing to me. I am more familiar with
references to interrupt 13, which is the basic BIOS call that is used
while booting, to boot from a disk. It just occurred to me, that
the idiots chose this moment to use decimal notation, when everyone
else uses hex - i.e. interrupt 0x13 = 19 decimal. So, a description
like "Set this value to allow option ROMs such as network controllers
to trap BIOS interrupt 19." means in your case, the IT8212 ROM can
capture calls to boot from the attached disks. Try enabling the
Interrupt "19" Capture option and see if you have any more boot
options. With Capture enabled, the IT8212 BIOS should respond that
it has a "virtual" disk to boot from.

Another BIOS reference, if you find your Asrock manual difficult
to follow, is here. This is the AMI manual for one of their
BIOS, and presumably some of their customers just copy this stuff
to make their own manuals.

http://www.megatrends.com/support/doc/MAN-EZP-80.pdf

HTH,
Paul
 
Hi Paul

Thanks again for your new reply. whilst I think I inderstand what you
are saying, there is no such option in either the motherboard BIOS or
the RAID BIOS, concerning Int 19 (0x13). My motherboard manual is here
http://www.asrock.com/Drivers/Manual/ASR_UM/K7S8X_UM_v10.pdf, and as you
can see there a very few options, and nothing concerning booting from a
SCSI or third party disk controller. I think I'm going to have take the
card out and use it in an unmirrored way, as there doesn't seem to be a
way around this. Most new motherboards seem to have SATA raid, but all
my disks are IDE, which adds to the expense if I had to buy IDE to SATA
converters. I guess that's life

(e-mail address removed) (Paul) wrote in
 
Ratty Burger said:
Hi Paul

Thanks again for your new reply. whilst I think I inderstand what you
are saying, there is no such option in either the motherboard BIOS or
the RAID BIOS, concerning Int 19 (0x13). My motherboard manual is here
http://www.asrock.com/Drivers/Manual/ASR_UM/K7S8X_UM_v10.pdf, and as you
can see there a very few options, and nothing concerning booting from a
SCSI or third party disk controller. I think I'm going to have take the
card out and use it in an unmirrored way, as there doesn't seem to be a
way around this. Most new motherboards seem to have SATA raid, but all
my disks are IDE, which adds to the expense if I had to buy IDE to SATA
converters. I guess that's life
Click to expand...
Does this post make any sense ? Does the array appear as a "disk" ?
Maybe it is just the nutty AMI boot setup.

http://groups.google.com/[email protected]

Paul
 
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