2 raid cards boot problem

[chunkymonkey]

Hi all,
In my old server I have two raid card one scsi with raid 5 (NT installed and at full capacity) the other contains 2 new 120 gig drives and is an highpoint rocket raid 100.
The trouble is no matter which slot i put the new rocketraid into, the system tries to boot from it.
Is there any way around this, because i'm not going to raid the other 2 drives (I'm just using the controller to use the new drives full capacity) and I don't want to reinstall nt server because of time and lack of data protection.

Hope you can help

 

[ski]

Go into CMOS Setup, and select SCSI to boot first in the BIOS settings.
If that option is not available, then the Highpoint drives will always be 1st in the boot order since they're IDE drives, and IDE always gets booted ahead of SCSI unless specified otherwise in BIOS.

 

[chunkymonkey]

In theory it should have worked but didn't. It's Probably because the system will treat the ide raid card as scsi. I would put the drives straight on to the motherboard but because it's old now (PII 300 on a abit slot one) it won't recognise the size of the drives in bios.

There must be a way to not boot the highpoint card.


Thanks for your help so far.

 

[iibboo]

Assuming you are going to use the 120 gig drives for data only and that the os is on the initial raid card. Try using a third party software such as partion magic to change the status of the primary partions on the ide drives to inactive (just not active)this should cause the boot to fail from those drives. The system would then continue to look for a bootable partition and would find the origional raid bootable.

fdisk sets the first partition to active by default without the option to turn it off so a thrid party software is necessary to make this change.

 

[chunkymonkey]

The ide drives are brand new and the neither card is set active and the ide card is not set to boot but the system prompts "Disk Boot Failure, insert system disk and press enter" If I remove the highpoint card altogether however the system boots as normal.

P.S I have contacted highpoint by email but have had no response as yet.

Thanks so far.

 

[iibboo]

What brand/model is the server? Does it have any EISA slots on the motherboard?
Older Compaq and IBM's used a EISA setup that would determine the boot confiuration by card. This allowed you to determine which controler had priority.

 

[chunkymonkey]

It's not branded as it was built by myself a few years ago. The motherboard is an Abit (probably lx series) and has a slot 1 pII 300 in it.

1 agp
4 pci
2 isa

On a seperate note, a collegue of mine has said that ide will always boot first, if that is the case i will have no chioice but to reinstall the os. Can anyone confirm this?

 

[ski]

Is the SCSI boot drive configured with ID 0?

 

[chunkymonkey]

Nothing is set to id 0, however i can only set one of the drives to id 0 and there are 4 of them technically i suppose they're all the boot drive as it's raid 5. Unless you mean the id of the card itself which defaults to 7 but can be changed.

 

[ski]

Leave the SCSI card at ID 7, and make sure the SCSI boot drive is set at ID 0.

 

[chunkymonkey]

Hi ski,
As I mentioned previously, technically there isn't 'a' boot drive there's 4 (because it raid) I can move one of them to id 0 but the boot data is split over the drives so I don't know if this will help.

If I do move one,this does it affect the raid at all as I have 50 gig of data that i would prefer not to lose.

Thank you for your assistance so far.

 

[ski]

Sorry about my confusion regarding the RAID config.
I was misreading your posts.

I suppose then that it may not be possible to boot from your SCSI RAID setup.

 

[chunkymonkey]

I've just had an email back from adaptec and I cannot boot with scsi if ide is present. So I have installed nt again.

Thank you all for your help.