How many disk drives?

[kimco52]

I have an AMD64 system with a Gigabyte motherboard. The board has both IDE ATA133 ports and SATA ports. I have an additional Promise 133 card which has two ports. My mobo IDE ports have my C drive, a zip drive, and two Pioneer DVD drives. The Promise card has 4 hard drives. I boot on the C drive on the mobo.
This combination works just fine. When I added a SATA drive, all of a sudden the computer does not get past BIOS test. It does not even try to boot up. If I unplug one of the IDE drives, it boots just fine and the SATA drive is seen and works normal.

I do not see any hardware conflicts but don't discount the possibility. Do I have too many drives? Is there a limit? It does not get to the operating system. It does not leave POST tests. The last message and where it dies is "Verifying DMI pool". This is also the last message before booting normally. The BIOS detects all drives during the test including the ones on the Promise card.

I have tried a few Promise cards but no difference.
Am I missing something here?

[redwudz]

I have 8 hard drives in my video server, all IDE (PATA) and it has no problems. But I also have a 400 Watt, good quality power supply. Too many drives, not likely. But you could run low on IRQs for your PCI slot controllers. But with SATA, not likely either.

Your PS may be overloaded. That seems a good possibility when you unplug one of the other drives and it all works. You might also try unplugging one or both of your DVD drives and see if all the PATA/SATA drives will work. If so, sounds like a power problem. If your PS is sufficient, then you might try a different SATA drive. There may be something with that drive that is causing the problem. Also try a different SATA port.

[Ron B]

redwudz has a good point. My system was running along just fine with a 430w PSU until I reached six hard(4 SATA, 2 PATA) drives along with an SATA controller card. I noticed heavier duty programs like Photoshop and Premiere doing some funny things until I upgraded to a 550w PSU. All good now.
PSUs are kind of the component nobody pays much attention to, but it is a very important part of the computer.

[kimco52]

I have a 600W Power supply in the system. I also have a SCSI card with two drives on it and it does not matter if they are on or not... meaning I can unplug the controller card (Adaptec) and it makes no difference. So it isn't SCSI drives, it is only IDE pata and Sata drives that seem to matter. I can try the second port and see if it makes any difference. Lots of cooling, also.

[betamaxman]

Not sure exactly what your problem is for sure, but mixing sata and ide displays different problems with regards to motherboards and bios. All I can do is comment on my own experience. My system has two 250 WD ides and two 250 WD satas. The ides were first and all was fine, then I got my two satas and that was when my troubles began. If I had only the two satas and my OS on the first one all was fine, same for the ides. But the two together and as with you trouble. The fix for me was to set scsi as my first boot device and install all my OSs (6 of them) on the first sata. from then on all was golden. Seems bios see satas similarly as they do scsi drives, so don't know how this would work if you also had the scsi in, but worth a try with it out. I have a dfi infinity ultra mobo, the boot order in my bios is 1 flopy, 2 cdrom, 3 scsi, 4 HDD. So maby scsi before hdd might help you, but as I said don't know about with the scsi card in or not. Good luck.

[redwudz]

I have a couple of computers with mixed SATA/PATA drives. The biggest problem I found was that the IDE drives seem to be preferred by the OS for boot. If I disconnected a SATA boot drive, the OS would insist I had no boot drive when I plugged it back in, even after several reboots. If I booted with the XP disc in the DVD drive, then everything was fine from then on.

But even with all that, I would get a 'No OS installed' error. It wouldn't make it to the boot screen or even to the BIOS screen. I have had some brands of SATA drives behave better, mostly Seagate and Hitachi. Maxtor was my problem drive. But it works fine in different computer with only SATA hard drives. And my problem was only with boot drives.

kimco52, you might boot into 'Safe Mode with Command Prompt' and you may be able to step through the boot sequence to see when the error occurs. It's usually the one after the last step displayed. You can also try 'Enable boot logging' to see if you can get a record of the problem.

I suspect it has something to do with your SATA BIOS. It may be booting first, even before you get to the boot screen. I know my SATA BIOS is the first screen displayed, even before the boot screen. I think this is to set up the SATA drive for the OS to look to them for boot info. It may be your new drive is checked and with no OS, errors out. I don't know, that's just a guess.

[kimco52]

My SATA is a Maxtor 250. My main "C" drive is a 90GB Hitachi that works just fine but is close to being full. I wanted some breathing room and decided to clone it to a larger drive and then decided to migrate it to a SATA. I did the duplicate thing with everything else (Promise and SCSI) disconnected and then booted on the SATA. Seemed to be OK. Then I added the other drives to the system and started getting wierd messages on boot up. It would all of a sudden want to "check" one of the drives on the Promise card and would come up with all kinds of errors... kept rolling them off the screen. Then it said it fixed them and all was fine. Then it would finish booting. Then I would go to the drive it "corrected" and it had errors on about half the files on the disk. I would load a jpg and it would fail to load. Problem with files. All of a sudden, I thought I had lost over half the data on that drive. The next boot, it wanted to check a different disk. I stopped it before it started. Then when I started getting messages such as......the validation on my Photoshop CS2 is no longer valid..... My Premiere validation was outdated...etc. Even without running them. (I have the Production Suite). So, I turned off that drive and went back to my old PATA drive and booted with it. I went to the drive that the SATA checked and noticed that my files were still there and worked OK. My Adobe stuff still works correctly. Now I just use that SATA as a data drive which it seems to be doing just fine as a storage device except with the problems noted in my first posting. AND, those problems existed when I used it as a boot drive also...... It would not boot without one of the IDE drives unplugged. Note: My C-drive ATA, one of the Promise ATA's and the SATA are on removeable mobile docks.
I could boot in the safe mode but I don't get that far. It does not get out of the BIOS. The sequence of "detection" in my BIOS tests is the onboard IDE, The onboard SATA, The Promise ATA then the Adaptec SCSI.
When booting the OS (XP PRO), Each position on each connector has a defined drive letter associated with it... The mobile docked drive on the Promise Card is always a master drive and has the drive letter "E".

I'll have some "experiment" time this week to try some of the ideas mentioned above.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

some 'older' mobos will do SATA or PATA, but not both.
some that are not quite as old will do both, but you have to tell the BIOS that this is what you are doing.
some will allow both, but only if you set up a RAID.
The PS is a good possibility, but I think you need to read your mobo user manual closely as well.

[kimco52]

My Mobo is Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939. I have read the manual many times and find nothing to explain it.... unless I am missing something. It does not say you can't do both or must use a RAID configuration.

[Ron B]

It sounds like you know what you are doing, but here's a couple things that have caused me problems in the past;
When I clone my boot drives with Acronis(which I do to make a spare backup drive), I have to turn off the computer when the cloning process is finished, disconnect the original boot drive, hook up the cloned drive in the primary boot position and start the computer. If I clone the drive but do not hook it up to finish the process, it will not work to boot the computer later.
Double check the boot drive sequence in the BIOS. Installing and reinstalling drives and controller cards can sometimes screw it up. In most cases it should be ; Floppy Disc Drive, CD(DVD) Drive, Hard Drive with OS. If your hard drive is on a controller card, the controller card goes third. If you don't have a floppy drive, the CD drive would be first, OS hard drive(or controller card), then something else.
Since all your hardware seems to be working, it's most likely a configuration issue.

[betamaxman]

I feel it is most likely as I said, the boot order for hard drives has to be scsi first. Another slim possibility could be that the mbr and partition table was not copied properly from the ide drive to the sata. But I am leaning towards placing scsi first in the boot order before hdd to solve your problem.

[kimco52]

Thanks for all the tips guys.
I have changed the boot order inside the BIOS as necessary during all these tests.
I am confuse when you say to put SCSI first.
My boot drive is either the on board SATA, or the on board PATA master on cable 0. There is no boot drive on THE SCSI card. Those are two small SCSI drives. The Promise ATA card appears as a SCSI card but here again, there are no boot drives on the promise card.

So, how would I set SCSI as the boot device and what would that accomplish?

[Ron B]

If your boot drive is the onboard SATA, that should be the first hard drive in the boot sequence. You can put the SCSI controller before it(actually it's the drives connected to the controller card), but if the computer does not see an operating system on those drives it will just go to the next drive in the sequence until it finds the OS.

[kimco52]

OK,
I have no trouble booting on the correct hard drive in the sequence except when I have all drives connected. In that situation, which is my problem, It never gets to the boot sequence. It hangs up in the POST tests in BIOS. The first item in my sequence is the floppy. You can hear it access the floppy when it starts booting. When all drives are connected, you do not hear the floppy being accessed which means it never gets that far with all drives in. After I get some sleep (worked all night), I'll try some of the suggestions mentioned.

[Ron B]

Unhook everything except the floppy, optical drive and the one onboard SATA you are using as the boot drive. Set the boot sequence in that order. See if that will fly. If it does, add one drive or device, like your controllers, at a time until you find out which one is the problem.
I've used a couple Promise controller cards, sometimes they can be tricky to install and use.

[betamaxman]

As I said some bios get confused with sata and see them as scsi (when there is an ide drive or drives connected as well). Anyway what do you have to lose, pull the scsi card out and set the bios to scsi as your first hard drive choice, with the ide drives still connected that is. This is what is needed on my dfi board with both sata and ide.

[kimco52]

OK,
I tried all the suggestions with no different results. As best I could.
One thing I did notice was that it has something to do with the Promise Card....not necessarily directly. Note that I have tried 3 different Promise cards... the original 133 card, an older 100 card, and a new 133 card with the latest firmware. All have the same result. If I disconnect one drive from the four on that card, the system boots as normal and I can access the SATA drive as a normal drive. (booting to the IDE boot drive on the motherboard IDE port) However, disconnecting any and all drives (DVD writers, Zip drive) from the motherboard IDE ports makes no difference...... only drives on the Promise card affect the situation. And it does not seem to matter which drive is removed or what the manufacturer of the drive is.

Remember, it is not a windows boot problem. It is a BIOS problem. The problem is that I do not get out of the BIOS tests routine to start the boot process.

My BIOS does not have a SCSI boot option in the boot order. I only have "hard disk" as a boot option. I don't have a IDE or SCSI option. I have multiple USB options but only one hard drive option. So my order is normally:
1) Floppy
2) Hard Disk
3) CD
I could probably reverse the hard drive and CD with no noticeable effects as long as I don't have a CD in the drive.

That seems to be how it is. I wonder if it would change if I used a different motherboard. Not ready to try that because of the Windows XP problems. If I change the MOBO, it would start booting and then say it is no good and I would have to start all over again with reinstalling the operating system fresh over and having to call Microsoft in some outpost in India with some dude that doesn't speak very good english and explain to him why I am installing XP with all the installs used up and having to explain what I did and that my disk crashed again or whatever. Then it has to reinstall(download) all the upgrades to get back to the level I am currently at.
Wonderful Microsoft. Even Adobe is going that way.

[Ron B]

Sometimes a controller card, no matter if it is a PATA, SATA or SCSI device will show up in the BIOS as a "SCSI Controller". So even with a controller card installed there is no boot option for the card? Remember, it can be called by a few different names. That's kind of unusual.
Your boot order should be Floppy-CD-Hard Disk, reason being, you can boot your computer from a Windows installation CD.
If your computer works OK when you yank one of the drives off the controller card, that's probably the way it's going to have to be. The only reasons for that I can think of is that there is not enough power for all the drives, maybe an IRQ conflict or your PCI bus just can't handle all the traffic. Maybe something between those particular cards and the mobo. Maybe installing more recent mobo chipset drivers?

[kimco52]

Thanks Ron,
And I am beginning to agree that "If your computer works OK when you yank one of the drives off the controller card, that's probably the way it's going to have to be" for now.
I think I have enough power because I can remove other stuff, giving up some power, and it still behaves that way and all seems solid. 600 (maybe 650) watts. Perhaps it is an IRQ or memory conflict that is confusing the system. Finding that is the problem, in BIOS. There are some IRQ conflicts/duopolies with other devices but Windows figures it out.
When wanting to boot from the CD, I go in and change the order. I could leave it with the CD as #2 because I usually never have a CD in the drive while booting anyway and I have them set up for non auto detection on insert in Windows because of all the video and DVD work I do.... I don't want to have to tell Windows to ignore everytime I insert a CD or DVD. I don't normally want autorun.

Thanks to all for your ideas and help.

[Ron B]

You should be able to turn off autorun and still be able to boot from the Windows CD. There is a difference between a regular CD and a bootable disc.
You can probably save a lot of headaches by getting one bigger hard drive and bail some of the other drives. At least your rig is running, albeit with a little less hard drive space, not that bad.

[redwudz]

That's sounding like a problem with the Promise BIOS. Though you may not see it on the screen, that is probably the first device the computer BIOS checks. Most add on cards show a BIOS screen. Mine come up before the computer BIOS start to display. I'm not sure why it would be hanging the system, though. You could check the Promise website and see if they have a forum where someone may be having a similar problem.

I would try a different brand/chipset PCI controller card. Maybe pick up a cheap Silicon Image chipset card. I have a couple of Promise cards, but I just use them for my extra optical drives.

[kimco52]

The first device the the computer BIOS checks is the onboard IDE ports...It identifies all four of those drives, followed by the SATA ports, followed by all the other cards and stuff on the mother board, then it goes to the Promise BIOS then to the Adaptec BIOS, then it tests and lists all the connections.... IRQ's for all the devices, then does a Verifying DMI assignments then it starts the boot process. When all drives are installed, it does not start the boot process. It hangs after Displaying the DMI statement. I don't know what that means or does.
The Mobo uses nForce3 250 GB chipset supporting the AMD Athlon 64/64FX processors.

[Nelson37]

IIRC the Promise cards did something slightly non-standard to provide the four extra HD connections. Also, many Mobo share resources between the SATA and PATA controllers, sometimes requiring RAID to be enabled, though the disks are not combined in any way.

I would try the BIOS on the Promise card and see if they can be set NOT to boot.

But the fact that the POST test does not finish in the failure state, indicates some sort of basic conflict. Check if any memory addresses or IRQ's can be changed. Try disabling one or the other channel if available, on the PRomise card. In fact, individually disable every setting available on the card, you may hit one which solves the issue.

[Ron B]

I might be mistaken here, but I would agree with the previous poster that when the boot process stops at the DMI screen, the computer has detected a problem and stops the process. Not being a big Promise fan, I would be quick to blame the Promise controller card for the problem. Maybe you've got a bad IDE channel on it or something. Sometimes reseting the CMOS might help in a situation like yours, but it sure seems the controller card is the source of your problems.
As far as controller cards go, I would take a Silicon Image chip card over just about anything else. Got one for some SATA drives in my current computer.

[kimco52]

I played around some more and took Nelson37 suggestion about enabling RAID.
The SATA drive has data on it.
I entered BIOS set up and enabled RAID and disabled all PATA devices for RAID but enabled the SATA port for RAID.
The BIOS post then showed RAID BIOS and said to press F10 to enter RAID setup. I did not and the system continued. It completed POST and then proceeded to load the operating system (XP). I got a message that Windows found new hardware and wanted to search for drivers. It said it found hardware Maxtor 6L300 (?) which is the model of the hard drive in SATA. It could not find any drivers on the system or via internet. I checked "MY COMPUTER" and did not find the drive listed.
I went to Disk manager and it did not show up there, also.

I rebooted and when asked to enter RAID setup I pressed F10 and entered. I showed the one drive and wanted me to move it from the left to the right and set it up with mirror or striping or whatever I choose.....
Not knowing what was going on or what to do because I don't understand RAIDS, I guess, and not wanting to lose the data on the drive, I backed out and it continued booting with the above results.
But, it got out of POST and booted with all drives connected.
You said that RAID could be enabled even though the disks are not combined in any way. I am assuming you mean that I can enable RAID and use the disk as a normal disk. If that is true and I can do it without losing the data on that disk, how would I do that... or how would I set it up in the RAID configuration setup screens?

[Nelson37]

There should be an option for Single Disk, or something similar. No Stripe or Mirror. It should let you select this option. Different BIOS do it different ways, if I could see the screens I could find it.

You want to avoid anything like "Build or Create the Array". These will essentially format your Hard drive. Though actually you should not need to make any changes here. RAID is turned on, that is all you need.

There should be some sort of RAID driver with the motherboard disks, this is what Windows is requesting. Even though it is not really used as RAID.

If you happen to have a blank SATA drive around for testing, that would be nice.

The motherboard manual should clarify PATA and SATA settings, including RAID, though the Promise card adds a complicating factor. Plus the true SCSI card.

SATA and the Promise cards are often identified as SCSI controllers, doesn't really mean anything. The Promise cards, like your true SCSI card, has its own BIOS setup program, I would also check both of these to see if any optional interrupts or memory addresses can be changed.

My understanding of why using RAID works for multiple PATA and SATA drives is that the motherboard allocates resources so as to limit the available connections, using RAID often turns off the 3rd and 4th SATA connectors. The benefit of the additional resources available even works when the ports are not physically present, as usually the circuitry allows for them to be installed. Its really a screwed-up workaround to implement SATA.

Some newer boards are using totally discrete channels and this problem basically goes away.

Your issue is interesting in that the Promise card is somewhow in this mix, disconnecting the one drive on it solves the problem. The drives will all be checked in order during POST, this is BEFORE the boot is attempted. Indicates that at least one drive is somehow inaccessable during POST, not necessarily the one on the Promise card, could be the one it is conflicting with.

I would also eliminate ALL the HD docking modules during testing. I have experinced a large number of unusual problems when using these modules. Minimize the Variables.

Carefully check the order drives are identified in. This could be a timing and recognition problem, basically a form of "Drive not Ready".

I saw the 600W power supply but you are running 5 IDE hard drives, 1 SATA, 2 SCSI, and 2 optical drives, correct? But all this worked before, the change is that the SATA is now the boot drive, not the motherboard IDE, correct?

[kimco52]

The motherboard IDE is the boot drive. You are correct on the drives, plus the zip drive. There are basically 11 drives in the system.

According to the motherboard BIOS pages, It can be set up as RAID0(Striping), RAID1(Mirroring), RAID0+RAID1, and JBOD(Spanning).

It says you can set it up as an NVIDIA RAID or Silicon Image.
The NVIDIA RAID BIOS takes you to the Define a New Array utility. It has you select Mirror, Stripe, Spanning, or Stripe Mirroring. You also select Striping Block Size. You Assign the disks (make of list of the ones used) Then you Clear Disk Data Y or N.

That's about it. I didn't see anything about Silicon Image. There are also instructions to get the driver from the MOBO CD and move to a floppy to be used to get drivers installed.

I don't see anything regarding "single disk" unless it is called something else.

[Nelson37]

So it does boot, but it is booting from the motherboard IDE drive?

And the system does not recognize the single SATA drive at all?

This would be essentially the same as disconnecting the single Promise card drive, just going from the other end. Except that is is physically connected, power drain would be the same, so power does not seem to be the problem.

See if you can load the Nvidia Raid drivers and recognize the disk. I would STRONGLY recommend backing up data on the SATA drive as it is essentially being connected to a new controller architecture and this is never good for data security.

You may want to try the other Raid controller/drivers. Basically you just want to enable RAID, setting up the array is usually not necessary. However, if it will not allow for a single disk, which sounds possible, the other drivers might.

But Windows did detect the SATA drive, just not in Drive Manager? Odd. Make certain the Nvidia RAID drivers are loaded, do a power off reboot, and see if it shows up in drive manager. Wait, look for some NVidia RAID software control suite, it may need to be setup there.

A RAID controller makes one, or several, drives appear to Windows as one unit managed by the controller. If the controller management is not set up, there may be no drive for Windows to manage. Once the setup is recognized, you may need to create partitions and format.

Best to do this with an empty drive, or one with no important data on it.

[kimco52]

Yes, the system does boot from the MOBO IDE, which is what I want it to do at this time. Because that is the only way I can access all drives at some time.

If I pull one of the Promise Drives (which is easy because one is on a mobile dock, then the system will boot with the SATA drive in non raid form. XP does recognize it as J drive (that is the way I set it up), and Drive Manager sees it, also. I can access data just fine. The problem is that if I have all Promise drives in and connected at the same time, the system does not boot. As I mentioned yesterday after enabling RAID in BIOS but not enabling any drives, it still will not boot but enabling the SATA drive as RAID in BIOS but not setting it up in the RAID BIOS will boot the system but XP then recognizes new harware, identifying it as the Maxtor 6L300 but I do not see it in "My Computer" or in Disk Manager.

It is possible that the RAID drivers are not loaded. I will get them off the mobo CD and install them and see if that makes a difference.

First, I will check that all data on that drive is backed up somewhere.

[kimco52]

I have loaded all the drivers that are on the mobo CD. Some, I have no idea what they do. There is not good documentation on the files.
However, If I disable RAID on the SATA drive, but still enable RAID, the drive does not show up as RAID but as a plain old SATA drive. As long as there is not a full complement of 4 drives on the Promise card, the system will boot and XP detects the drive and assigns it an identifier (J) and it is seen in Disk Manager.
If enable RAID on the SATA drive in BIOS, then POST runs the RAID BIOS and it detects that SATA drive but assigns it as a RAID device. If I do not go into the RAID BIOS, the system boots even with a full load on the Promise card and XP detects new hardware but does not know what to do with it. It wants to find drivers. It doesn't find any because it is not looking for RAID because it has not been set up in the RAID BIOS (I'm assuming). It thinks the device is the model number of the disk drive. There are no drivers for a disk drive model number, obviously. So, it does not show up as a disk drive to Windows.

If I enter RAID BIOS, there is no option for single disk. There are four options as I noted earlier....Mirror, Striping, Mirror + Striping, and Spanning. It defines Spanning as storing data onto a drive until it is full, then proceeds to store files onto the next drive in the array. When any disk member fails, the failure affects the entire array. It further states thatt Spanning is not really a RAID and does not support fault tolerance.
So, I am wondering if I were to set it up as Spanning, and only had the one drive, would that effectively be the same as a single drive managed by the RAID software as you mentioned. Then Windows would know the RAID and assign it a drive letter and manage it through the RAID driver as the other 4 drives are managed by the Promise driver.
Does that sound right? I have all the data from that drive somewhere else so if I were to start it over, I would not lose anything.