[Techtalk] Simply Hardware 3B

[Sophie]

Andrew,

Things to do:

As you said your system boots from the cdrom when the raid card is installed, i assume your amibios settings are correct, and wont touch those. I dont know AMI's bios configuration off the top of my head anyway, so I cant help you there without feedback from you. Jenn seems to be more helpful than me regarding configuring the bios, so i'll volunteer her ;)

Remove all the cards (sound, network etc) except the raid controller and graphics card. Unplug the drives from the raid controller, leave the cdrom plugged into the motherboard - see if it boots. If it dosent, then possibly the card is incompatible with your graphics card? That's unlikley. I'll assume you're still with me, and it's working so far :)

Plug the drives back into the raid controller. Personally I wouldnt trust CS, and manually set them to master/slave. You have an ata/133 controller, so make sure you're using 80-pin cables (blue sockets to the card, grey for slave and black for master). The plugs should be polarised qith a little notch so you cant get them the wrong way around. Turn it on - the AMI bios should boot, then procesed to the Raid's medley bios. Check it can see the drives ok, and that you can initialise whatever kind of raid you desire (your raid card's manual explains this, and will tell you how to enter the medley bios setup utility).

Assuming that all worked, you now know the raid card can address the drives ok, see if it can boot past the raid's bios and continue booting from the cdrom, as it did with no raid card installed. If it dosent, let me know :)

Assuming it does boot, replace the cards, and see if it boots, one at a time.
If it doesnt, then possibly the order that the pci cards is being initialized is effecting it (I view this as unlikley, but I've had it happen before...) Swap the raid controller with the card you just added. (this is a bubble sort :)

Hope that helps,

- sophie