Asus A7N8X-Deluxe with SCSI boot drives and PATA to SATA drive slave conversion

Hi all

I have a problem with migrating my PATA drives to SATA on my
A7N8X-Deluxe board.

Researching before posting makes me think this a common problem and I
post in case this has been resolved.

Issue and setup
Motherboard as above with 1013 BIOS
I have an IBM SCSI controller hosting 2 x 36Gb SCSI drives as RAID 1
I have an Adaptec board running a DLT tape drive
I have 2 x PATA drives connected to the primary IDE channel
Originally installed Small Business Server 2003 with only SCSI drives
installed. Added PATA once OS was up and running - so MBR is located
on the SCSI drives.
This has run fine for 18 months or so.

On replacing the PATA for SATA drives, the system fails to boot. The
SATA drives are detected during BIOS detection. I hear the system
message "Now booting from operating system" at which point Windows
loads. Now, I hear a beep as the system reboots. I do not see the
Windows loader screen.

If I detach the SATA connectors from the drives, Windows boots -
reconnect, symptoms above return.

I also know the SATA HDD & controller works as I connected the SATA
data connector once Windows loaded and Windows/Disk Manager detected
and formated the SATA drive.

BIOS boot order set to SCSI. All other boot options disabled.

Any ideas or is this boot order a "feature" of this motherboard?

Bitstring <. com>, from
the wonderful person lwoody7110 <> said
>Hi all
>
>I have a problem with migrating my PATA drives to SATA on my
>A7N8X-Deluxe board.
>
>Researching before posting makes me think this a common problem and I
>post in case this has been resolved.
>
>Issue and setup
>Motherboard as above with 1013 BIOS
>I have an IBM SCSI controller hosting 2 x 36Gb SCSI drives as RAID 1
>I have an Adaptec board running a DLT tape drive
>I have 2 x PATA drives connected to the primary IDE channel
>Originally installed Small Business Server 2003 with only SCSI drives
>installed. Added PATA once OS was up and running - so MBR is located
>on the SCSI drives.
>This has run fine for 18 months or so.
>
>On replacing the PATA for SATA drives, the system fails to boot. The
>SATA drives are detected during BIOS detection. I hear the system
>message "Now booting from operating system" at which point Windows
>loads. Now, I hear a beep as the system reboots. I do not see the
>Windows loader screen.
>
>If I detach the SATA connectors from the drives, Windows boots -
>reconnect, symptoms above return.
>
>I also know the SATA HDD & controller works as I connected the SATA
>data connector once Windows loaded and Windows/Disk Manager detected
>and formated the SATA drive.
>
>BIOS boot order set to SCSI. All other boot options disabled.
>
>Any ideas or is this boot order a "feature" of this motherboard?

It's a feature of ALL motherboards that the boot order for SCSI devices
(indeed the enumeration order) depends on where they show up on the PCI
bus - typically things nearest the PSU end get selected for booting
first. Sadly I bet the on-board SATA controllers come out ahead of even
the first PCI slot (SATA is pseudo SCSI). You may be able to figure it
out with MSInfo32 or with AIDA32 or whatever.

I'm not sure whether marking the SATA drive partitions as not-active, or
not-bootable, or whatever is going to make the problem go away, but I
bet that's the problem. Now if you attached the SATA drives to a
separate PCI SATA controller and put it further away from the PSU than
the SCSI card ... elsewise I guess you need to reinstall the/an OS to
the SATA drives.

--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Google may be your friend, but groups.google.com posters definitely aren't.

From my recollection, with this mobo, sata/raid driver had to be installed,
from floppy, using F6 option during the installation or repair of win,
whether using raid or not.
Presumably your pwr supply is up to the load?

"lwoody7110" <> wrote in message
news: ups.com...
> Hi all
>
> I have a problem with migrating my PATA drives to SATA on my
> A7N8X-Deluxe board.
>
> Researching before posting makes me think this a common problem and I
> post in case this has been resolved.
>
> Issue and setup
> Motherboard as above with 1013 BIOS
> I have an IBM SCSI controller hosting 2 x 36Gb SCSI drives as RAID 1
> I have an Adaptec board running a DLT tape drive
> I have 2 x PATA drives connected to the primary IDE channel
> Originally installed Small Business Server 2003 with only SCSI drives
> installed. Added PATA once OS was up and running - so MBR is located
> on the SCSI drives.
> This has run fine for 18 months or so.
>
> On replacing the PATA for SATA drives, the system fails to boot. The
> SATA drives are detected during BIOS detection. I hear the system
> message "Now booting from operating system" at which point Windows
> loads. Now, I hear a beep as the system reboots. I do not see the
> Windows loader screen.
>
> If I detach the SATA connectors from the drives, Windows boots -
> reconnect, symptoms above return.
>
> I also know the SATA HDD & controller works as I connected the SATA
> data connector once Windows loaded and Windows/Disk Manager detected
> and formated the SATA drive.
>
> BIOS boot order set to SCSI. All other boot options disabled.
>
> Any ideas or is this boot order a "feature" of this motherboard?
>

Thanks for replying

I tried moving the SCSI card up the bus in case that helps. The SATA
drives are brand new - so they have no active/inactive partitions on
them. The BIOS should find the MBR on the SCSI drives.

My PSU is fine with a decent 460W. I draw about @ 150W when booted and
I have never seen more than 170W.

The option in the BIOS to pick SCSI/SATA changes the order in which the
BIOS presents the SCSI BIOS and the SATA BIOS screens. If I select
SATA 1st (but 1st boot device left at SCSI), I get the message with NO
OPERATING SYSTEM. This tells me the BIOS is not enumerating the SCSI
properly.

If I reverse it and I get the original posting. I have selected (TRY
OTHER DEVICES) in the boot menu. This makes the board try to boot from
PXE etc and it fails. I guess this is just one of those "features"
that I will be stuck with but might find a cure if I ever reinstall the
OS.

I think the PCI card method is the solution to the BIOS problem. If I
buy a card, I will post results.
Thanks again

"lwoody7110" <> wrote in message
news: ups.com...
> Hi all
>
> I have a problem with migrating my PATA drives to SATA on my
> A7N8X-Deluxe board.
>
> Researching before posting makes me think this a common problem and I
> post in case this has been resolved.
>
> Issue and setup
> Motherboard as above with 1013 BIOS
> I have an IBM SCSI controller hosting 2 x 36Gb SCSI drives as RAID 1
> I have an Adaptec board running a DLT tape drive
> I have 2 x PATA drives connected to the primary IDE channel
> Originally installed Small Business Server 2003 with only SCSI drives
> installed. Added PATA once OS was up and running - so MBR is located
> on the SCSI drives.
> This has run fine for 18 months or so.
>
> On replacing the PATA for SATA drives, the system fails to boot. The
> SATA drives are detected during BIOS detection. I hear the system
> message "Now booting from operating system" at which point Windows
> loads.

??so you ever see the ====== that windows displays when booting?

> Now, I hear a beep as the system reboots. I do not see
> the
> Windows loader screen.

I assume that means you never get to select safe mode because windows never
loads??

What did you do to prep the SATA? Did you clone the PATA to them first?
Could they have an active primary partition and you got stuff on them
already? You should be able to put a "blank" unpartitioned and unformatted
disk on the system and be able to boot into windows. If you cant do that
then the bios is attempting to boot the disk.

> If I detach the SATA connectors from the drives, Windows boots -
> reconnect, symptoms above return.
>
> I also know the SATA HDD & controller works as I connected the SATA
> data connector once Windows loaded and Windows/Disk Manager detected
> and formated the SATA drive.
>
> BIOS boot order set to SCSI. All other boot options disabled.

I suspect that SCSI is considered SATA. You might pull off the SATA disk
that is on the primary SATA connector and see if it can boot the SCSI and
still recognize the SATA on the secondary connector.

If the disks are empty, never partitioned, the problem is undoubtedly the
bios on the motherboard. If they are basic disks, and you got a partition,
you might (I am guessing as I never did it) convert them to dynamic disk. A
discussion of dynamic vs basic disks is here
http://support.microsoft.com/default...309044&sd=tech
I suspect that dynamic disks cannot boot so you might end up with only the
scsi's being bootable so your problem is solved. You might as that question
over at comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage and see if there is something you
can do to prevent an SATA from booting. Raid issues are discussed there
also.

> Any ideas or is this boot order a "feature" of this motherboard?
>

I assume you do not want to migrate the OS over to the SATA or you would
have done that.


--
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http://ResearchRiders.org Ask about my 99'R1100RT
http://TipsForTheComputingImpaired.com
================================================== =====================

You are correct, I do not get the select the menu items for safe mode
as the system reboots before this point. I do not see the "======="
dots across as Windows loads normally. I think the SCSI is
misinterepted as SATA although the BIOS menu still specifies SATA or
SCSI as boot choices. I did try both SATA connectors individually in
tested. I am no longer interested in trying to fix this problem with
SATA. My solution is to buy another PATA drive as a direct replacement
for the failed drive.

Well - I think the problem is down to hardware conflicts. I tried
another SCSI controller (Adaptec 29160) and this SCSI controller will
work with SATA drives. This issue is with the IBM SCSI controller
(Intel® Server RAID Controller SRCU31A) and the onboard SATA on this
motherboard.

My testing involved simply removing the IBM + SCSI HDD and installing
the Adaptec 29160 + another SCSI drive together with the SATA drive
attached. The Adaptec controller was able to begin a Windows
installation with the SATA connected. This is further than the system
can get with the IBM card installed. The IBM card is at its latest
firmware revision. I think this concludes the post. Hopefully my
findings might be useful for another SCSI user with this motherboard.