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Has Nebody been able to boot off a SCSI card?

New MessageHas Nebody been able to boot off a SCSI card? (modified 0 times) maestro
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This would easliy allow for ading devices like CD-ROM, Zip, etc.
01-09-2001 12:57:43

New MessageRE:Has Nebody been able to boot off a SCSI card? (modified 0 times) Vector
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Of course! :)

I'm not sure how much you know about SCSI in general on the PC side of things, but to be certain, I'll cover everything I Think of.

1: First, make damn sure your SCSI card has a BIOS on it. Without this, the card will not boot any onboard SCSI devices. (including HD, zip, etc.) You can generally assume your card has a bios on it if your SCSI devices are shown some time after POST and before the OS boots up.

2: you need to remove the DOC. End of discussion there.

3: in the BIOS setup, make sure the boot device is flagged as "SCSI, C:".

4: Depending on your operating system, and the size of the SCSI drive, some partition modifications will have to be made. Since most of the stuff I'm doing involves Linux, I'll cover that first.

a) If your drive is over 1.8GB, you will need to apply standard partitioning schemes to get LILO to operate. Personally, I create a /boot partition of about 5-10MB as the first partition (/dev/hda1) with linux fdisk.

b) Beyond the normal BIOS kernel booting, you will need to have your SCSI card's kernel module compiled in. (Generally, almost every adaptec card, and some Future Domain's have good support.)

For windows, oddly enough, the same problems can apply. I had trouble booting DOS into the machine, until I made a very small C: partition in DOS fdisk, and did "format C: /u /s". Then it booted fine.

A special note for people who've used other OS's on the particular SCSI Drive they're using: MAke sure the drive is completely zero'd out. (your SCSI card manufacturer should have such a DOS utility available on their web site, or available in the BIOS of nicer cards.)

If this is too complex for you, I suggest trying IDE. Less driver/bios issues to worry about, and MB's these days are designed with that in mind.

02-24-2001 21:57:14

New MessageRE:Has Nebody been able to boot off a SCSI card? (modified 0 times) packrat
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I seem to have issues booting with SCSI. Th drive is bootable because it boots fine on another PC but when I put it all in the web surfer I get DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT A SYTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER. What would cause this?
03-24-2001 08:18:50

New MessageRE:Has Nebody been able to boot off a SCSI card? (modified 0 times) packrat
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I figured it out. The SCSI card was taking IRQ 15 and that seems to conflict with something onboard. Went to the PCI config portion of BIOS and set the IRQs manually - 10-15 are now set for Legacy.
03-24-2001 08:57:10

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