Help Appreciated on Disk In Poweredge 800

[phavenhand]

I have a Dell Poweredge 800 server. The machine came with an adpatec scsi controller and hard disk.

Having some problems with scsi disk, so want to switch back to a normal ide disk.

I have removed the scsi controller , and installed a seagate 40gb ide disk as a master on the ide cable. I have changed the CD rom to be a slave on the cable.

In the bios , it shows the hard disk as Primary and CD and secondary ide devices. I have run the Discwizard utility to partition the disk.

I intend to have the machine as a Novell Netware 5.1 server , but for the life of me , cannot figure out , how to install.

If i use a boot disk , and try and run Fdisk , i get the error "no hard drives found". However , if i boot the machine with an XP CD , I can create a partition , install all the setup files , but when the machine reboots without the CD it says no boot device found.

In the bios , there is a list of boot devices , which only shows the floppy drive and the CD rom. I cannot add the hard drives to the list.

My questions are... Is it possible to boot from an IDE disk on a poweredge 800. In the documentation it only seems to mention SCSI and SATA. I have tried configuring the machine to use a SATA drive , but had exactly the same problems (no SATA devices found).

Coudl anyone explain how i can get the machine to boot to an IDE drive and also , how to get a dos partition on the drive , so i can then install netware.
I would prefer to use an IDE drive , rather than a SATA driveif at all possible.

Many thanks in advance

Pete

 

[mainegeek]

phavenhand,

"Having some problems with scsi disk, so want to switch back to a normal ide disk."

Did you ever have a bootable ide drive on this before?
Is the ide controller enabled in the bios?


Here's the specs for your rig.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe800/en/UG/k3843aa.htm#wp1053877

 

[phavenhand]

Hi

NO , the machien came with a SCSI adaptor and a SCSI Hard Disk.

My question is this.. Is it impossible to set these machines to boot from an IDE Drive.
The drive is recognised in the bios , but cannot get it to be the boot device

Thanks for any help

Pete

 

[G0AOZ]

Tried a complete reset of the BIOS to see if it will recognise connected IDE devices?

The only other option I can think of is to add a PCI IDE interface card such as a Promise controller. This has its own on-board drive BIOS, and is usually treated by the main motherboard BIOS as a SCSI device.

Good luck.

ROGER - G0AOZ.