Hey guys,

I have an old box that might make a nice server except that I can't get the SOB to boot anything. It has an adaptec 29160 scsi controller with three devices on it: a cd and two HDs.

The BIOS sees all the devices and I can choose any boot order. But the end is always the same: No Operating System found. When I have a boot disc in the cd slot it even gives a message "You have a bootable CDROM in the drive" but it refuses to boot from it.

The boot order seems weird to me. No matter what I select in the BIOS (Phoenix 4.0) it always starts up, gives the screen when you can select BIOS setup, then goes right to the SCSI controller. I see the lights on the CD flashing, then there is the message from the SCSI controller if I want to go into that setup. Then it flashes the cd lights again and says you have a bootable cd-rom blah blah blah and shows me the two HDs. And then there is a long wait and then the No operating system found message.

Does anybody know wtf is going on here?

Thanks,
Rand

Lets check a few things.
Is the scsi chain terminated correctly?
What ID's did you set the devices to as well as the card itself?
In the bios the IDE channels are disabled?

Does seem odd when it sees a bootable CD that it does not boot from the CD.

Brian1

Hi Brian,

I don't know if the chain is terminated properly but: the BIOS and the SCSI controller see all three devices (showing type of device, capacity, name, etc) and auto termination is set in the adaptec setup.

I didn't change any settings. The card is on 7 and the two drives are on 4 and 5 with the cd on 6.

I did disable the IDE channels but I also tried it with ide primary so it could find the other atapi cd but that didn't work so now it's back to ide completely disabled. I also disabled the floppy since i used to get a floppy drive error message.

Thanks,
Rand

Make the drives 0 and 1.

Brian1

The device IDs really do not matter as long as they are unique.

What CD are you trying to boot? Is it a known good bootable disk?

Hi guys,

Yes, I've tried a few. I'm usually installing something somewhere so I keep a lot of disks on hand. I tried known good discs like my Slackware, gparted, and Kanotix. It doesn't try to boot from the drive.

No idea why the cd's will not boot.

Brian1

Yeah, me neither

Is your scsi card a raid card? I have an (older) server with an adaptec scsi raid card. You have to configure containers in the scsi bios to make the drive acessable.

It would be great if it were but I think it's just a plain SCSI card. I looked on the website and I didn't see anything about RAID on that model.