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The Adaptec curse or why can't I boot from an SCSI cdrom
Hello fellow Adaptec Users I have 10 computers that have Adaptec SCSI controllers installed. One uses a 39320 card, but most use 39160 cards. All the SCSI cdrom's are Plextor UltraPlex units also known as the PX-32CS. I have a boot CD I have created to run Norton ghost and copy disks, create images, and restore from images. On the older motherboards I have no problems, and I can boot from a cdrom just fine, but on the more recent motherboards I have a variety of problems that I have developed workarounds for, but it's still a PIA. I have two P4T-E motherboards. On the first one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:". Not exactly the verbage, but you all have seen it and know what I am talking about. If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a diskette, any diskette, in drive A: then the system will boot from the cdrom drive. My workaround for this system is to keep an old recovery diskette in the drive and insert it any time I want to boot from the cdrom. On the second one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:" . If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a non-bootable diskette in drive A: I get the normal "not a system disk. Insert a bootable disk and press any key". If I put a DOS boot disk in drive A: the system will boot from it. My workaround for this system is to keep a copy of the diskette I used to make the bootable image for the ghost CD and insert that when I want to boot from the cdrom. The diskette loads DOS and the cdrom drivers, then switches to the CD and loads ghost. I have two P4C800 motherboards. The first one works identically to the second P4T-E, so I keep a diskette with the CD boot image on it in that machine also. The second P4C800 is a little more complicated. On that machine I also have a Plextor DVD drive; A SATA PX716SA. I used to be able to boot from the SCSI cdrom drive by using the boot menu. Just hit F8 during the memory test and the pop-up boot menu appears at the end of the BIOS processing and gives me the option to boot from any of the detected devices. If I try that now the system looks in drive A: then it checks out the DVD drive which is empty of course, and finally gives me a little different "no system disk" type of message but the meaning is clear that it can't find the boot image it told me a few seconds ago it just read from the CD. If I put a CD in the DVD drive or a diskette in the A: drive it will attempt to boot from either one. However since I have the SATA drive set to enhanced mode in the BIOS for the benefit of Windows, the system will freeze up during the boot process. Yes, I could go into the BIOS and change the DVD settings to compatible, boot from the DVD drive, go in afterwards and change it back, but it's easier to put a floppy with the CD boot image on it in drive A: just as I did in the 2 previous machines.. Now, what is going on here? All these machines used to be able to boot from the Plextor SCSI drive just fine and all with their current controller cards. I have tried the bootable CD in the older computers and it works fine so it's not the CD. Sure I have made changes to some of the BIOS settings over time, and I have upgraded the BIOS versions and as of now all computers are running the latest version. I have not changed the settings in the BIOS on the controller cards and the computers that work and those that fail have the exact same settings. I have no recollection of any changes around the time these problems started. It just seemed like the problem occurred with one of the P4T-E machines one day, then later on the other, and finally the P4C800's were cursed as well. All this happened over an extended period of time. Anyone have any ideas? Paul, if you read this I would welcome your opinion. |
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Montana Pete wrote: Hello fellow Adaptec Users I have 10 computers that have Adaptec SCSI controllers installed. One uses a 39320 card, but most use 39160 cards. All the SCSI cdrom's are Plextor UltraPlex units also known as the PX-32CS. I have a boot CD I have created to run Norton ghost and copy disks, create images, and restore from images. On the older motherboards I have no problems, and I can boot from a cdrom just fine, but on the more recent motherboards I have a variety of problems that I have developed workarounds for, but it's still a PIA. I have two P4T-E motherboards. On the first one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:". Not exactly the verbage, but you all have seen it and know what I am talking about. If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a diskette, any diskette, in drive A: then the system will boot from the cdrom drive. My workaround for this system is to keep an old recovery diskette in the drive and insert it any time I want to boot from the cdrom. On the second one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:" . If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a non-bootable diskette in drive A: I get the normal "not a system disk. Insert a bootable disk and press any key". If I put a DOS boot disk in drive A: the system will boot from it. My workaround for this system is to keep a copy of the diskette I used to make the bootable image for the ghost CD and insert that when I want to boot from the cdrom. The diskette loads DOS and the cdrom drivers, then switches to the CD and loads ghost. I have two P4C800 motherboards. The first one works identically to the second P4T-E, so I keep a diskette with the CD boot image on it in that machine also. The second P4C800 is a little more complicated. On that machine I also have a Plextor DVD drive; A SATA PX716SA. I used to be able to boot from the SCSI cdrom drive by using the boot menu. Just hit F8 during the memory test and the pop-up boot menu appears at the end of the BIOS processing and gives me the option to boot from any of the detected devices. If I try that now the system looks in drive A: then it checks out the DVD drive which is empty of course, and finally gives me a little different "no system disk" type of message but the meaning is clear that it can't find the boot image it told me a few seconds ago it just read from the CD. If I put a CD in the DVD drive or a diskette in the A: drive it will attempt to boot from either one. However since I have the SATA drive set to enhanced mode in the BIOS for the benefit of Windows, the system will freeze up during the boot process. Yes, I could go into the BIOS and change the DVD settings to compatible, boot from the DVD drive, go in afterwards and change it back, but it's easier to put a floppy with the CD boot image on it in drive A: just as I did in the 2 previous machines.. Now, what is going on here? All these machines used to be able to boot from the Plextor SCSI drive just fine and all with their current controller cards. I have tried the bootable CD in the older computers and it works fine so it's not the CD. Sure I have made changes to some of the BIOS settings over time, and I have upgraded the BIOS versions and as of now all computers are running the latest version. I have not changed the settings in the BIOS on the controller cards and the computers that work and those that fail have the exact same settings. I have no recollection of any changes around the time these problems started. It just seemed like the problem occurred with one of the P4T-E machines one day, then later on the other, and finally the P4C800's were cursed as well. All this happened over an extended period of time. Anyone have any ideas? Paul, if you read this I would welcome your opinion. Maybe it is an Adaptec issue. Now that I think about it, I was never able to successfully boot a Windows installation cdrom from an Plextor SCSI CD drive/Adaptec 391XX or 2940 combination in new P4C800 motherboards. For this reason, I install from an ATAPI-IDE CD drive and then re-configure for SCSI afterwards. Don't have time to fiddle with Ctrl-A and setting in the Adaptec bios settings. |
#3
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Montana Pete wrote in message ...
Hello fellow Adaptec Users I have 10 computers that have Adaptec SCSI controllers installed. One uses a 39320 card, but most use 39160 cards. All the SCSI cdrom's are Plextor UltraPlex units also known as the PX-32CS. I have a boot CD I have created to run Norton ghost and copy disks, create images, and restore from images. On the older motherboards I have no problems, and I can boot from a cdrom just fine, but on the more recent motherboards I have a variety of problems that I have developed workarounds for, but it's still a PIA. I have two P4T-E motherboards. On the first one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:". Not exactly the verbage, but you all have seen it and know what I am talking about. If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a diskette, any diskette, in drive A: then the system will boot from the cdrom drive. My workaround for this system is to keep an old recovery diskette in the drive and insert it any time I want to boot from the cdrom. On the second one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:" . If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a non-bootable diskette in drive A: I get the normal "not a system disk. Insert a bootable disk and press any key". If I put a DOS boot disk in drive A: the system will boot from it. My workaround for this system is to keep a copy of the diskette I used to make the bootable image for the ghost CD and insert that when I want to boot from the cdrom. The diskette loads DOS and the cdrom drivers, then switches to the CD and loads ghost. I have two P4C800 motherboards. The first one works identically to the second P4T-E, so I keep a diskette with the CD boot image on it in that machine also. The second P4C800 is a little more complicated. On that machine I also have a Plextor DVD drive; A SATA PX716SA. I used to be able to boot from the SCSI cdrom drive by using the boot menu. Just hit F8 during the memory test and the pop-up boot menu appears at the end of the BIOS processing and gives me the option to boot from any of the detected devices. If I try that now the system looks in drive A: then it checks out the DVD drive which is empty of course, and finally gives me a little different "no system disk" type of message but the meaning is clear that it can't find the boot image it told me a few seconds ago it just read from the CD. If I put a CD in the DVD drive or a diskette in the A: drive it will attempt to boot from either one. However since I have the SATA drive set to enhanced mode in the BIOS for the benefit of Windows, the system will freeze up during the boot process. Yes, I could go into the BIOS and change the DVD settings to compatible, boot from the DVD drive, go in afterwards and change it back, but it's easier to put a floppy with the CD boot image on it in drive A: just as I did in the 2 previous machines.. Now, what is going on here? All these machines used to be able to boot from the Plextor SCSI drive just fine and all with their current controller cards. I have tried the bootable CD in the older computers and it works fine so it's not the CD. Sure I have made changes to some of the BIOS settings over time, and I have upgraded the BIOS versions and as of now all computers are running the latest version. I have not changed the settings in the BIOS on the controller cards and the computers that work and those that fail have the exact same settings. I have no recollection of any changes around the time these problems started. It just seemed like the problem occurred with one of the P4T-E machines one day, then later on the other, and finally the P4C800's were cursed as well. All this happened over an extended period of time. Anyone have any ideas? Paul, if you read this I would welcome your opinion. A few general comments: -- Non-hard disk SCSI components (including CDROMs) are going the way of the dinosaur, and system manufacturers are becoming more and more reticent to fix these kinds of boot problems in their system bioses (and that IS where most of these problems reside). Really the best long-term solution is to move to IDE CDROMs. -- Make sure your Adaptec controllers have the latest bios. -- Taking one machine as a test case, try different PCI slots for the SCSI controller and see if it makes any difference. |
#4
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In article , Montana Pete wrote:
Hello fellow Adaptec Users I have 10 computers that have Adaptec SCSI controllers installed. One uses a 39320 card, but most use 39160 cards. All the SCSI cdrom's are Plextor UltraPlex units also known as the PX-32CS. I have a boot CD I have created to run Norton ghost and copy disks, create images, and restore from images. On the older motherboards I have no problems, and I can boot from a cdrom just fine, but on the more recent motherboards I have a variety of problems that I have developed workarounds for, but it's still a PIA. I have two P4T-E motherboards. On the first one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:". Not exactly the verbage, but you all have seen it and know what I am talking about. If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a diskette, any diskette, in drive A: then the system will boot from the cdrom drive. My workaround for this system is to keep an old recovery diskette in the drive and insert it any time I want to boot from the cdrom. On the second one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:" . If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a non-bootable diskette in drive A: I get the normal "not a system disk. Insert a bootable disk and press any key". If I put a DOS boot disk in drive A: the system will boot from it. My workaround for this system is to keep a copy of the diskette I used to make the bootable image for the ghost CD and insert that when I want to boot from the cdrom. The diskette loads DOS and the cdrom drivers, then switches to the CD and loads ghost. I have two P4C800 motherboards. The first one works identically to the second P4T-E, so I keep a diskette with the CD boot image on it in that machine also. The second P4C800 is a little more complicated. On that machine I also have a Plextor DVD drive; A SATA PX716SA. I used to be able to boot from the SCSI cdrom drive by using the boot menu. Just hit F8 during the memory test and the pop-up boot menu appears at the end of the BIOS processing and gives me the option to boot from any of the detected devices. If I try that now the system looks in drive A: then it checks out the DVD drive which is empty of course, and finally gives me a little different "no system disk" type of message but the meaning is clear that it can't find the boot image it told me a few seconds ago it just read from the CD. If I put a CD in the DVD drive or a diskette in the A: drive it will attempt to boot from either one. However since I have the SATA drive set to enhanced mode in the BIOS for the benefit of Windows, the system will freeze up during the boot process. Yes, I could go into the BIOS and change the DVD settings to compatible, boot from the DVD drive, go in afterwards and change it back, but it's easier to put a floppy with the CD boot image on it in drive A: just as I did in the 2 previous machines.. Now, what is going on here? All these machines used to be able to boot from the Plextor SCSI drive just fine and all with their current controller cards. I have tried the bootable CD in the older computers and it works fine so it's not the CD. Sure I have made changes to some of the BIOS settings over time, and I have upgraded the BIOS versions and as of now all computers are running the latest version. I have not changed the settings in the BIOS on the controller cards and the computers that work and those that fail have the exact same settings. I have no recollection of any changes around the time these problems started. It just seemed like the problem occurred with one of the P4T-E machines one day, then later on the other, and finally the P4C800's were cursed as well. All this happened over an extended period of time. Anyone have any ideas? Paul, if you read this I would welcome your opinion. Well, I'm no "IT guy", and the solution you would use for one computer, won't scale well for 10 or 100 computers. As your post above indicates, it is a lot of work to record the foibles of each machine type individually. The motherboard boot order has been problematic since the introduction of AMI BIOS. I don't recollect the same kinds of issues with boot order for Award, but then again, I haven't been doing this stuff for that long. The AMI BIOS just doesn't seem to have a "strategy" when it comes to booting. If a piece of hardware goes missing since the last boot, the boot order will change, in unpredictable ways. In terms of the messages you are getting, I expect some of them are coming from the SCSI BIOS. The one about the substitution for the floppy, for example. Again, I have no detailed knowledge of how INT 0x13 services work, how the various BIOS modules register their services at boot time - it would seem that the SCSI BIOS is doing floppy emulation some how, and moving the real floppy out of the way. If I pretend for a moment, to be the "IT guy", I guess I would ask the question as to what common denominator will work on all computers. I think the answer is an IDE based CDROM drive. I get some damn fine drives at my local computer store for about $30 and haven't had problems with them. If the budget allows, I think I would equip all the machines with an ordinary old-fashioned CD drive. I'm a little surprised at your SATA DVD results, and that you actually needed to switch to "Compatible" mode. The purpose of "Compatible" is to make SATA devices appear like IDE devices, so that an older OS is unaware that a new hardware type is present. I guess I did not expect, when running "Enhanced", that there would be a difference in the way that boot operation would work with the SATA DVD. Live and learn. Since motherboard BIOS, at a minimum, will be tested to boot from a floppy, IDE CDROM, IDE hard drive, all of which are connected to the Southbridge, that is where I would want to install devices that "just have to work". For less demanding "data only" purposes, I would let the users have their SCSI chains, USB jump drives, whizzy this and that, Promise RAID arrays, but leave a vanilla CD for the "IT guy". In a bigger company, there would be some kind of network based deployment - just set it up during the day, then at night, deployment scripts fix all the machines. Without automation, administering machines rapidly gets out of hand. (I've administered about a dozen Unix machines in a departmental setting, and that is where I learned that scalable approaches are a must - and that I wasn't cut out to be the "IT guy" :-) I was just the local "go-to" guy with zero budget.) HTH, Paul |
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Montana Pete wrote: Hello fellow Adaptec Users I have 10 computers that have Adaptec SCSI controllers installed. One uses a 39320 card, but most use 39160 cards. All the SCSI cdrom's are Plextor UltraPlex units also known as the PX-32CS. I have a boot CD I have created to run Norton ghost and copy disks, create images, and restore from images. On the older motherboards I have no problems, and I can boot from a cdrom just fine, but on the more recent motherboards I have a variety of problems that I have developed workarounds for, but it's still a PIA. I have two P4T-E motherboards. On the first one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:". Not exactly the verbage, but you all have seen it and know what I am talking about. If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a diskette, any diskette, in drive A: then the system will boot from the cdrom drive. My workaround for this system is to keep an old recovery diskette in the drive and insert it any time I want to boot from the cdrom. On the second one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:" . If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a non-bootable diskette in drive A: I get the normal "not a system disk. Insert a bootable disk and press any key". If I put a DOS boot disk in drive A: the system will boot from it. My workaround for this system is to keep a copy of the diskette I used to make the bootable image for the ghost CD and insert that when I want to boot from the cdrom. The diskette loads DOS and the cdrom drivers, then switches to the CD and loads ghost. I have two P4C800 motherboards. The first one works identically to the second P4T-E, so I keep a diskette with the CD boot image on it in that machine also. The second P4C800 is a little more complicated. On that machine I also have a Plextor DVD drive; A SATA PX716SA. I used to be able to boot from the SCSI cdrom drive by using the boot menu. Just hit F8 during the memory test and the pop-up boot menu appears at the end of the BIOS processing and gives me the option to boot from any of the detected devices. If I try that now the system looks in drive A: then it checks out the DVD drive which is empty of course, and finally gives me a little different "no system disk" type of message but the meaning is clear that it can't find the boot image it told me a few seconds ago it just read from the CD. If I put a CD in the DVD drive or a diskette in the A: drive it will attempt to boot from either one. However since I have the SATA drive set to enhanced mode in the BIOS for the benefit of Windows, the system will freeze up during the boot process. Yes, I could go into the BIOS and change the DVD settings to compatible, boot from the DVD drive, go in afterwards and change it back, but it's easier to put a floppy with the CD boot image on it in drive A: just as I did in the 2 previous machines.. Now, what is going on here? All these machines used to be able to boot from the Plextor SCSI drive just fine and all with their current controller cards. I have tried the bootable CD in the older computers and it works fine so it's not the CD. Sure I have made changes to some of the BIOS settings over time, and I have upgraded the BIOS versions and as of now all computers are running the latest version. I have not changed the settings in the BIOS on the controller cards and the computers that work and those that fail have the exact same settings. I have no recollection of any changes around the time these problems started. It just seemed like the problem occurred with one of the P4T-E machines one day, then later on the other, and finally the P4C800's were cursed as well. All this happened over an extended period of time. Anyone have any ideas? Paul, if you read this I would welcome your opinion. This is all very disappointing, because you've determined that more recent Asus BIOSes simply don't support Adaptec's SCSI BIOS the way they used to - as evidenced by your systems booting from HDD or floppy after the Adaptec BIOS already pushed them aside. Unfortunately Rick is probably correct - Asus will have little interest in fixing the problem, which relegates you to using workarounds or IDE CDROMS - which have never had full el-torito support. P2B |
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"deus maximus" wrote in message
. .. In article , says... Montana Pete wrote: Hello fellow Adaptec Users I have 10 computers that have Adaptec SCSI controllers installed. One uses a 39320 card, but most use 39160 cards. All the SCSI cdrom's are Plextor UltraPlex units also known as the PX-32CS. I have a boot CD I have created to run Norton ghost and copy disks, create images, and restore from images. On the older motherboards I have no problems, and I can boot from a cdrom just fine, but on the more recent motherboards I have a variety of problems that I have developed workarounds for, but it's still a PIA. I have two P4T-E motherboards. On the first one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:". Not exactly the verbage, but you all have seen it and know what I am talking about. If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a diskette, any diskette, in drive A: then the system will boot from the cdrom drive. My workaround for this system is to keep an old recovery diskette in the drive and insert it any time I want to boot from the cdrom. On the second one if I boot from the CD I get the message "A bootable disk has been detected. I has been assigned as drive A: and your A: diskette has been reassigned as drive B:" . If I let the boot process continue normally the system will ignore the CD and boot from the first hard disk drive. If I put a non-bootable diskette in drive A: I get the normal "not a system disk. Insert a bootable disk and press any key". If I put a DOS boot disk in drive A: the system will boot from it. My workaround for this system is to keep a copy of the diskette I used to make the bootable image for the ghost CD and insert that when I want to boot from the cdrom. The diskette loads DOS and the cdrom drivers, then switches to the CD and loads ghost. I have two P4C800 motherboards. The first one works identically to the second P4T-E, so I keep a diskette with the CD boot image on it in that machine also. snip I have the earlier 19160 Adaptec connecting a HDD and 2 CDD drives on the P4P800. No problemo--I would contact Adaptec support and also look for an Adaptec bios fix. -- Best Regards, I've had an issue with the Asus A7N8X deluxe bios with scsi devices in the past. If I flash the motherboard bios to have the latest Silicon Image Sata bios installed it will not boot correctly, i.e. it will not see sata / scsi hdd's or scsi / ide cdrom drives as boot devices and just hangs. Changing the boot order or the sata / scsi bios order makes no difference, only disabling the sata bios allows me to boot the machine. Flash the bios back to the older version and no problems at all, installing the new sata bios into the old motherboard bios also hangs the machine leading me to believe some change in the sata bios has caused a problem. I reported this to Silicon Image - no response, I reported it to Adaptec - no response. If its old hardware then forget Adaptec they just don't care about bios problems if its older than 6 months and Silicon Image don't even register the 3112a sata interface as one of their products anymore. Steve |
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"Pug" wrote in message ...
I've had an issue with the Asus A7N8X deluxe bios with scsi devices in the past. If I flash the motherboard bios to have the latest Silicon Image Sata bios installed it will not boot correctly, i.e. it will not see sata / scsi hdd's or scsi / ide cdrom drives as boot devices and just hangs. Changing the boot order or the sata / scsi bios order makes no difference, only disabling the sata bios allows me to boot the machine. Flash the bios back to the older version and no problems at all, installing the new sata bios into the old motherboard bios also hangs the machine leading me to believe some change in the sata bios has caused a problem. I reported this to Silicon Image - no response, I reported it to Adaptec - no response. If its old hardware then forget Adaptec they just don't care about bios problems if its older than 6 months and Silicon Image don't even register the 3112a sata interface as one of their products anymore. Which Adaptec controller are you using? Which bios version? |
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