scsi drive not detected

[tigerbright]

Hi - I installed windows XP onto a scsi drive via a pci hdd host bus adapter card
but bios , while detecting the adapter controller, would not detect the drive as a bootable option.
My guess is this card is a oem with boot option disabled
(I have read that they have this as a control option)

Is they any vendor or other tool that will enable system to boot.

compaq evo D510
BIOS 68602 v 3.18
windows XP pro oem
pci scsi host bus apdapter card Adaptec 29160 family
compaq scsi ultra3 and tried seagate ultra320

This system had a scsi drive as an option

I have tried ctrl+A at boot but no response
F9 option shows boot options excluding scsi
BIOs setup shows not option for scsi
I had also removed the master ide drive.

any ideas ?

(ps - is just an interesting project - 2 x SATA 3.0Gbps drive in an array set via a pci SATA raid card would be simpler and cheaper )

[caperjack]

hi, you will need to install the drivers for scsi adapter when install windows ,by hiting f6 when you boot to windows cd. you will need the drives on a floppy disk[there may be other ways ,but windows only see floppy disk i think ],i have a dell workstation with 36gig scsi disk and adaptec pci adapter .
look here for proper driver .
http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/

[tigerbright]

Hello Caperjack - thank you for your advice however I did install windows XP onto the single scsi drive using driver from
http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/scsi/u160/ASC-29160/

and using the F6 install 3rd party driver option.
Subsequently boot up via hdd failed - bios would not detect drive as a bootable option.

but it appears that to configure a program called EZ-SCSI utility might be helpful - as device bootable may have been disabled

But i can not locate that utility

The cards I haved used are obviously designer oem cards - as they have the rom chip missing and reduced attachment support
I have ordered a third card that is hopefully retail and so maybe the system BIOS will detect as bootable.

But that EZ-SCSI utility would be helpful

regards

[caperjack]

not sure about ez-scsi ,i see it when google search for it but kind of privey ,and only seems to be for win95-to 2000,

i have an older scsi drive and adaptc card that i installed in a few computer over the past few years and didn't have any problem install and booting to them ,but i think i might have been doing a dual boot ,used a bootmanager and dual booted it a few times . used this osl2000.
http://www.osloader.com/download.htm

[tigerbright]

thanks caperjack for your replies - as it transpires, I took delivery of a 29160n model card and this is fully bootable and has SCSIselect config console (seems the previous 29160i models are not on my systems)

Anyhow, looks promising as an effective single drive upgrade from a 7200rpm IDE drive on a ATA100 onboard bus slim form factor system
in which only one hard disk drive can be installed.

On my test 3200+ 400FSB 1GB ddr system using XP sp2 with about 5GB of mainly system files, boots from 1st windows boot screen to no disk activity in 25 seconds
Runs a comodo full system anti-virus scan in about 3 minutes

have attached an ultra320 10,000rpm seagate scsi drive.
(card is 160MB/s on a 133MB/s pci bus)

Proposed host system for upgrade is a evo D510 PIV @1.8MHz 512MB ram memory, 7200rpm 2MB cache ATA133 drive using onboard ATA100ide host bus adapter
with 9GB of system and setup files etc
Current time to boot from 1st windows boot screen to no disk activity = 165 seconds
Current time to manually scan using comodo 50 - 58 minutes

Upgrade should be interesting

regards from tigerbright

[jbennet]

You gotta hit F6 during the bluescreen bit and load the driver from a floppy.

had to do it myself on an old compaq proliant server. check your essentials pack for the disk. And use smartstart to install the OS.

[tigerbright]

hi - XP pro (retail) setup has usable drivers by default for 29160 family scsi controller cards - I just update driver downloaded from the adaptec site after setup is complete , and after updating windows installer to ver 4.5 and updating the mainboard chipset driver.
This drive/adapter combo will really wake up retro-age systems for drive intensive tasks including page file usage, that are still using disk drives attached to the typical ATA100 onboard ide host bus adapter
I have just ordered a few 15,000rpm drives....
regards

[tigerbright]

just one other consideration - one must use a u320 ultrawide3? cable to enable full speed for bus
on a pci bus I benchmarked almost 80MB/s sustained, which may not seem much but accesss speed as beanchmarked by HD Tune at 8ms from typical 12-14ms for a std desktop drive, and with the scsi drive it can make 16 guesses (recommended optimal for windows but can be configured for 32 "guesses") of what the next page or set of pages will be rather than 4 guesses for a standard drive (sorry, don't know the techie terms) from it's ralatively large 8MB buffer.
Was able to support windows 7 beta for smooth internet browsing @ 700MHZ cpu 100MHz FSB and 512MB sd-ram
(just curious as to how slow a system windows 7 would work for internet browsing)
But yes, if you have onboard SATA support - far more cost effective
for the record i currently use a 10K 1.5Gbps sata WD raptor drive using an onboard sata controller for my primary system.