Asus CUR-DSL SCSI & NT issue

[jfk]

We have 1U rack mount servers with ASUS CUR-DSL motherboards. We have two Seagate 18GB SCSI drives attached to SCSI-A. We have setup about a dozen of these as BSD servers with no problems. However, we have an app that requires we load WinNT or Win2000. I've had nothing but problems loading NT. I've tried the latest drivers from Asus and LSI for WinNT (and Win2k) but the install never recognizes the drives. I got Win2000 to install but the drivers change the controller speed setting down to 80 from 160. I probably could live with that but at the 80 setting, NT crashes every time. I can manually reset the controller back to 160 and boot but I have to do this every time I boot. This is unacceptable for a headless rack mounted server. The SCSI info follows:

LSI Logic Corp. Symbios SDMS V4.0 PCI SCSI BIOS, PCI Rev 2.0, 2.1 PCI-4.18.02

Anyone run into this before? Any ideas? I'm stuck.

John Kenney
Third Rail Ltd.
34 Franklin St. Suite 100
Nashua, NH 03064 USA
john.kenney@third-rail.net

http://www.third-rail.net

 

[seaninsjca]

We see this problem all of the time with almost any SCSI controller and Win NT or 2k. For Win NT 4.0 the easiest way to solve the problem of the drives not being recognized is to use the 3 boot disk install instead of installing from CD. Insert floppy 1, let it complete, insert floppy 2... wait until it says "Welcome to Windows blah blah blah. Hit Enter. Next it will say "Windows will now search for your hardware... don't let it! Press S, then press S again to specify hardware. Point it at the driver floppy, pick your controller and then hit enter. After the driver is loaded, it should ask for disk 3 and then continue on. Keep the driver disk handy as I believe that it is asked for again. With Win 2k, make sure you are hitting F6 immediately when it starts to install so the driver gets loaded at the correct location. The explaination I have gotten from Microsoft is that there are 3 specific locations that Windows NT / 2000 will accept drivers for the controller. If you do not catch the 1st instance, it will still let you load the driver, it just won't use it, instead a default driver will be used.

Sean

 

[jfk]

Unfortunately, I've been there and done that. The drivers provided by Asus (and LSI) will work to allow win2k to install (using the S option) but the problem is that the driver resets the bus speed from 160 to 80. The OS crashes at this setting. So, on reboot, I have to go into the controller and set the bus speed back to 160. Definite wierdness. I haven't gotten thru to Asus yet to see if this is a known issue.