Booting A7N8X from motherboard SATA RAID with PCI SATA card installed?

  • Thread starter Thread starter BrianP
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BrianP

Hi,

I am adding a large, new, Raptor, 74G, SATA drive attached to Western
Digital's PCI SATA adapter to an existing A7N8X Deluxe system which has
2 Raptor 36 Gs in a RAID 0 connected to the motherboard SATA RAID .
During the boot, the system finds the PCI card first and trys to boot
from it. Being a new drive, there is no OS on it. I have tried altering
the BIOS boot sequence between CD, SCSI, [SCSI | HD0 | HD1] and it
always boots from the PCI card. My hope was to boot from the RAID and
use Norton Ghost, clone the system and reinstall it on the new drive.

When I tried installing the RAID 0 Raptors on the PCI card, it doesn't
give the option to setup a RAID like the motherboard controller does and
the drives don't work at all. If I turn on the "enable other boot
device" in the BIOS, I get the Nvidia boot agent and a "media test
failure". The BIOS does find the 74 G Raptor in the boot sequence just
before it finds the RAID 0 with the 2 Raptor 36 Gs.

Is there a way to have the machine boot from the motherboard SATA RAID
rather than the PCI SATA (non-RAID) controller? Is my only option to get
a SATA RAID PIC card? Will the performance be hampered by having 2, 150
MB/s SATA channels feeding into a single, 133 MB/s PCI slot?

Thank you,

BrianP
 
BrianP said:
Hi,

I am adding a large, new, Raptor, 74G, SATA drive attached to Western
Digital's PCI SATA adapter to an existing A7N8X Deluxe system which has 2
Raptor 36 Gs in a RAID 0 connected to the motherboard SATA RAID . During
the boot, the system finds the PCI card first and trys to boot from it.
Being a new drive, there is no OS on it. I have tried altering the BIOS
boot sequence between CD, SCSI, [SCSI | HD0 | HD1] and it always boots
from the PCI card. My hope was to boot from the RAID and use Norton Ghost,
clone the system and reinstall it on the new drive.

When I tried installing the RAID 0 Raptors on the PCI card, it doesn't
give the option to setup a RAID like the motherboard controller does and
the drives don't work at all. If I turn on the "enable other boot device"
in the BIOS, I get the Nvidia boot agent and a "media test failure". The
BIOS does find the 74 G Raptor in the boot sequence just before it finds
the RAID 0 with the 2 Raptor 36 Gs.

Is there a way to have the machine boot from the motherboard SATA RAID
rather than the PCI SATA (non-RAID) controller? Is my only option to get a
SATA RAID PIC card? Will the performance be hampered by having 2, 150 MB/s
SATA channels feeding into a single, 133 MB/s PCI slot?

Thank you,

BrianP
Click to expand...

Have you tried creating a Ghost boot disk and
booting from that. I've never been able to boot
from the on board SATA raid when I've had
a PCI HD controller card installed but they've
all been Promised based cards that I've tried.
Also I've only been able to get Ghost to
recognize single drives. And if I remember
only on the standard IDE ports. The support
page on the ghost web site says they don't\support raid. I'm using Acronis
true image

Jim Manning
 
unfortunatly there is no way to do this the way you want to.
It will always boot from the pci card first.
You would have to make some kind of boot nmenu on the new drive to point to
the onboard raid.

If you did a completely fresh install of XP with all your drives attached
(including the pci card) then you coukd probably do it if you chose which
drive to set up XP on.

Havent tried it but it might work.
 
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