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REPOST: A7V333: no longer able to access hard disks at boot time
Hi. I posted this problem originally about three months ago, but didn't get a response. I'm trying again, hoping someone will have some advice for me. My basic problem: after almost a year of working properly, the system suddenly seems unable to boot off of either hard drive on IDE0/1, even though the drives seem to be working perfectly when accessed after booting through some other method. CONFIGURATION ------------- - A7V333-RAID w/ Athlon XP 2000, 2x Corsair 512MB CAS2 DDR333/PC2700 RAM. - IDE0: Lite-On LTR-48125W CD-RW, WD 1200JB hard drive - IDE1: Lite-On XJ-HD165H DVD/CD-ROM, WD 1200JB hard drive - IDE2 (Promise): WD 800JB hard drive, WD 1200JB hard drive - IDE3 (Promise): WD 1200JB hard drive - Teac (?) floppy drive - Matrox Millenium G550 video card with Viewsonic P95f+ monitor - Creative Soundblaster Live! 5.1 sound card - D-Link DFE-530TX+ NIC - HP LJ1200 attached through parallel port. The OS is located on the WD 800JB (80 GB) drive (the master on IDE2, the first channel of the on-board Promise adapter), freeing the four 120 GB drives (one on each IDE channel) to be used as a pair of RAID1 arrays. For faster execution, RAID functions are handled by the OS; the on-board Promise hardware is used solely for the extra IDE channels. The Promise *RAID* capabilities are not used at all. To be able to boot off CD when desired, the machine has to be configured to boot from IDE0/1 rather than the Promise channels, since the on-board Promise controller only allows disks to be connected. To allow the OS to reside on a disk on the Promise channels while still booting off IDE0/1, a bootloader is installed into the MBR of the first 120 GB hard disk (IDE0 slave) which points to the OS on the 80 GB drive. The BIOS is configured to attempt to boot off off, in order: 1. the CD-RW (IDE0 master); 2. floppy; 3. the first 120 GB hard disk (IDE0 slave). When it attempts to boot off the hard disk, it loads and executes the bootloader which loads the OS off the 80 GB drive on IDE2. I've had this system configured as described since early last November, working flawlessly under heavy load for a workstation, including numerous cold boots (after e.g. shutting down for a thunderstorm) and some warm boots (after e.g. Linux kernel recompiles). Not one crash or glitch of any sort, ever. THE PROBLEM ----------- I'm no longer able to boot from the hard drives on IDE0 or IDE1. The POST finds the drives OK: they're listed in the opening screen after memory is counted; and entering the BIOS setup screen shows all four devices on IDE0/1 just fine. So it's not as if it doesn't see the drives at all. But when it comes time to read from the MBR, trouble. If the boot sequence is left as above, and there are no bootable media in the CD or floppy drives, then the system hangs after trying the floppy drive, with the floppy drive light on; a hard reset is necessary. If the boot order is changed so that the hard drive comes first, then the system hangs immediately upon starting to try to boot, and again a hard reset is necessary. No error messages of any sort -- just a hang. Disabling CD and/or floppy booting doesn't change this; the boot still hangs when it gets to trying to boot from the hard drive. However, booting off the CD or a floppy is possible. In fact, I can boot the bootloader that would normally be in the first hard drive's MBR off a floppy, and use *that* to access the OS on IDE2 master without any problem. It's just like things would normally work, except the first step of the boot process goes through the floppy rather than the IDE0 slave like it used to. At this point, I might normally guess that there's some sort of problem with the drive. However, the OS doesn't use BIOS routines to access disks; it uses its own, entirely. Once the OS is booted, I'm able to mount and mess with *all* disks, including the disk in question. I've done hours of tests on it, filling it up and doing compares and so forth. The disk works perfectly through the OS; there's only a problem when attempting to access the MBR through the BIOS at boot-time. Another hint that it's not a problem with the disk is that I installed the bootloader into the MBR of the *other* hard drive on IDE0/1, the IDE1 slave, and changed the BIOS setting to boot off that drive instead of the IDE0 slave. Exactly the same thing happened -- system hang when it came time to boot off that disk. The fact that there's no error messages at all made me suspicious that maybe the MBR simply got munged somehow. So I re-installed the bootloader into the MBR, more than once. No effect. It is as if the BIOS can no longer read from the drives, or at least can no longer read from their MBRs. But how can the BIOS get munged in such a way as to work perfectly in every way *except* in trying to boot off a hard drive? I've spent the last three months booting off a floppy as a result of this, and I'd really like to fix this problem if I can. Any advice or suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks. -c |
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