Booting with 2 RAID arrays

[osuman]

Hello,
I have an ASUS A7N8X-E which has an on-board SATA RAID controller. To this I have attached 2 drives in a RAID 0 array and currently have my OS installed to it.

I also have a PCI RAID controller card that I want to attach two additional drives to keep data and my page file on.

I can install the card in the PCI slot and get Windows XP to boot and see the card no problem. However, as soon as I attach the drives to the card and configure the array, the system will not boot.

My BIOS has options for both "SCSI" device in the boot order and "Boot Other Device". Every configuration I try with these options and the BIOS still can't figure out to boot the damn drives on the onboard controller if the PCI device has hard drives plugged into it. It will either say "Boot Disk Failure" or it will try to boot the to the onboard LAN.

Any suggestions?

 

[wolluf]

Suspect you have a problem! (as both the SATA array and PCI connected drives both obviously use the SCSI setting to boot from - and it looks like PCI card has priority). I have that board also (though just use SATA and IDE drive - btw, why are you using a PCI card when there are 2 perfectly good IDE controllers on the board? Are you setting up another RAID 0 array there too?)

Possible workround - using a boot manager. I use

http://www.boot-us.com

(free for personal use) - installing its boot menu to a floppy drive (I don't know if it works with RAID arrays, but can't see why not). If you install it in windows then run to generate boot menu (just one o/s in your case) to floppy, then I think it will boot your SATA RAID installation whatever you do with PCI drives (as system no longer booting from SCSI device, but from floppy).

 

[osuman]

Thanks for the post. You are correct, I'm using the card because I want another RAID 0 array to keep my pagefile on (as well as other data).

I've thought about using a boot manager as you suggest. I guess I could install it on either the PCI RAID array or an IDE drive attached to the onboard ATA controllers and point it to the SATA drives to boot Windows. Seems kinda messy though...and I'm not sure how much trouble it would be to setup.

I'd like to get it working "properly". It seems like a shortcoming of the BIOS if it simply won't boot an active partition just because another RAID controller is installed. I'm going to see if I can get any response from ASUS tech support. Will let you know if I do. If not I will try the boot manager as you suggest.

Any one else run into this problem before?

 

[wolluf]

Boot-us should be no trouble to set up (assuming its ok with RAID arrays). If you have a floppy drive, why not try the scenario I outlined (it works exactly the same as installing it to mbr or partition on hard drive - in fact its how I use it all the time now as it doesn't update hard drives at all - so can't cause a problem) - it will take you 1 or 2 minutes to set up and try after installing boot-us.

 

[osuman]

I think I'm going to have to give up on this PCI RAID controller....

After trying everything I can think of, including updating the BIOS on the card, (it's an SiI 0608) and nothing working, I thought I'd give the boot loader program you had a try.

The program seems to work fine. I installed it to floppy and could boot to my RAID 0 array without any problems. However, once I plugged in the 0680 controller, boot-us hung when it started. I tried changing some BIOS settings, deleting the RAID, all without any luck.

I think the reason I had this card and wasn't using it was because I had been booting to a regular ATA drive on the onboard controller and with the addition of the card the OS would hang on boot also. For some reason I thought this would be different. (Wishful thinking??) Anyway, even if I had got the BIOS to boot the SATA drives it's likely it would have hung just like it did before and just like boot-us did right now.

Maybe this controller and my mobo don't play nicely together. Anyway, I'm gonna see if I can get a different PCI RAID controller that works better and has more configuration options.

I guess you get what you pay for....

Your suggestion was a good one. Thanks for all your help.