Cannot boot off SATA OS drive with SCSI card inserted?

[Pluto]

OK, this is weird. I have an Abit IC7 (Intel 875/ICH5R chipset). I'm using two SATA drives, but not in a RAID, one is my OS drive.

I picked up an old LSIULVD card and a Sony AIT2 scsi tape drive so I could back up some of my data to tape (just too time consuming to back up to 4gb DVD-Rs). I put the card in my system, go through POST, boom! No Boot into Windows (Insert Boot disk etc. error)

OK, check the BIOS settings for boot sequence, looks good here - my SATA drive is still the #1 in Hard Drive Boot order... Bootable Add-In Card is last... not that the LSI card is installing it's bios as there are no bootable devices (cd or hdd) connected, just the tape drive. Just won't boot. Take the scsi card out again, boots up normally.

anyone know if there is some weird issue with this chipset, sata drives and scsi cards?

 

[Big Lar]

Is bios giving the scsi card an IRQ? If not, it may be a bad card.

 

[Pluto]

I didn't notice if it was giving an IRQ, but the scsi bios does pop up and go through its scanning and finds the tape drive and everything.. it just says at the end bios not installed which is normal when no bootable drives are hooked up. Pretty sure it's a good card as it was pulled from a working system.

 

[Big Lar]

You may need to disable the boot section of bios for the card, It may be trouncing on another IRQ. Maybe try it in a different slot as well, if 1 is available.

 

[Pluto]

Tried another slot, it seemed to be using the same IRQ (11) which is not currently assigned to anything according to Windows device manager. I don't see any options for enabling/disabing the boot ability of the card in it's bios, perhaps because there aren't any bootable device connected it automatically does this itself.

 

[Pluto]

well, after trying everything I could think of for the last hour or two, I'm ready to give up. I'm convinced this is either a Chipset or BIOS bug (probably the latter) that is causing this board to just ignore the OnBoard SATA as a boot device when the SCSI card is inserted. There is no IRQ conflict, I even disabled all possible onboard device s and removed my PCI NIC to be sure of that. I wish I had another Ultra80 LVD scsi card to test with to see if it is just this particular card or any.

I guess I will try reporting the bug to Abit but I doubt there are going to do anything like release a new BIOS for a 3 year old board (last bios rls is almost 2 years old)

 

[Big Lar]

It could very well be the bios for the board, but then it could be something else that we are missing, sorry i couldn't help. I would check in bios tho, to see if there is a setting to boot from Other, or Interrupt 19 I think its called.

 

[Pluto]

There is an option 'Boot Other Device' which I tried turning off and it didn't make a difference.. I think the only thing this does is put 'Bootable Add-In Device' in the list of Hard Drive boot priority, but I tried setting Bootable Add-In Device to Onboard SATA RAID or PCI Card and it doesn't make any difference.

Someone on the Abit forums suggested setting Disable Unused PCI Clock to off for a similar problem, I'm gonna try that now.

 

[sunase]

One thing to check is if your SCSI card has a firmware update, that has fixed similar problems for me before. Although one system I just had to bite the bullet and buy an Adaptec card. No clue if mobos are more often compatibility tested with Adaptec or Adaptec does a better job or what, but I've noticed this is much less likely to happen with their stuff.

 

[corkyg]

Another clue is in how SATA drives are seen in some systems. My SATA drives are seen by Acronis TrueImage as SCSI drives. If that is the case, then a SCSI controller card could be preventing the SATA drive from being seen, IOW, it has taken over the IRQ channel used by SATA.

 

[Pluto]

I moved the card and drive over to my wife's PC which is an older i845 w/ no southbridge-controlled SATA (it has a Promise SATA Raid) and it works fine, so I'm gonna stick with that. I think sunase is right, Adaptec card would probably work but I'm not gonna bother as long as I can make it work in one machine.