Mixing SCSI & IDE RAID

[dmhinz]

So I am trying to mix both SCSI and IDE RAID on my Gigabyte 8INXP and meeting w/ total failure! I have an Adaptec 39320R controller + 15K U320 Cheetah & two WD 120 GB SE drives. I want to run the Cheetah as my primary boot drive and then have the dual 120's as a large mirror for storage. I want to use the onboard Promise 2076 controller to handle the IDE RAID. I thought it would be straight forward but, it's not.

If I set the boot order to SCSI 1st and specify SCSI (over RAID & SATA in the 8INXP BIOS) my Adaptec controller BIOS will load but not the onboard Promise BIOS. If I set RAID (over SATA & SCSI in the 8INXP BIOS) the Promise BIOS loads but not the Adaptec.

This is more complicated that an IRQ issue because I have tried moving the SCSI controller to every PCI slot and also set the IRQ manually - no effect.

When the SCSI is set for primary load I can get into XP and the OS detects the Promise controller and installs drivers but, it then lists as having an error in the device manager. The Promise BIOS never loads on boot in this case.

Has anyone ever tried (sucessfully?) to use this combination? I looked on the Adaptec support site but, found nothing in the FAQ section

-D

 

[Wolfsraider]

not sure if it will work but try unplugging the ide drives till you load windows on the scsi drives once it is up and running then rehook up the ide drives and load the drivers for the ide raid etc

i had to unhook the ide drive before to get the scsi loaded then it was a piece of cake for ide

but it wasn't raid

hth

mike

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

I've got this working. I have an adaptec 29160 to a 15K cheetah as my boot. Then I have an SIDE Raid PCI card (so not motherboard). I had to upgrade the BIOS on both cards. Then, as far as I can tell, the boot order is determined by which PCI card is first. As far as the BIOS is concerned, both cards are seen as SCSI and so selecting SCSI boot means hitting the cards in PCI order.

FWIW, I never could get this working on a Soyo Dragon with on-board RAID. So you might want to get a cheapie card and disable the onboard RAID and see if that does it - because this combo of 15K SCSI OS drive and RAID0 IDE data drives really performs extremely well.

 

[dmhinz]

Thanks for the suggestions - I was thinking this very solution last night. The onboard is nice because it doesn't take up any physical space but, because of that very fact, you can't move it around to change the IRQ/initalization order

The 15K U320 is defianatley a keeper and I agree this mixed solution will be sweet if I can get it up and running. My 39320 supports SCSI RAID and 73GB U160 disks aren't too expensive on ebay....they aren't nearly as cheap as large IDE which would be ideal for a mirror in my case.

-D