I have a few questions. I don't mind if you give your answers in expert mode.

1) I have a Highpoint 370 controller on my motherboard. When I enabled it during boot up LINUX pauses for about 15 to 20 seconds. Then it resumes its boot scripts. Before I enabled my Highpoint controller, LINUX did not pause. It seems trying to detect any raid array or something although I only have one hard drive. Its not the hard drive because it happend before I added a hard drive. What do you think is the problem?

2) Does anybody have any instructions to upgrade the Highpoint BIOS that is embedded on a motherboard so I can use the updated drivers from Highpoint. My motherboard is a ABIT KA7-100. I'm not going to do any RAID but I just want to update the drivers.

This may partially answer your questions.

I recently installed a HighPoint Rocket 100 PCI IDE card using the HPT 370A chipset. I do not use RAID. I downloaded all of the drivers, both RAID and non-RAID and got everything working nicely without installing any software from HighPoint.

I compile my own kernels. I compiled a 2.4.22-ac4 kernel and included the kernel's HPT37x support and it worked perfectly. I did not install kernel RAID drivers nor HighPoint RAID drivers of any kind. If you have both HTP37x kernel support and RAID kernel support maybe boot is spending 15 - 20 seconds waiting for something to respond before it decides that there is no RAID out there.

Before I installed the card I downloaded every driver from HighPoint that I thought might be even remotely applicable to the HPT370A. You will find the drivers here:
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/usaindex.htm
and I thing that the BIOS install instructions are in:
v121_BIOS_r100.zip

HighPoint lists two BIOS versions, v120 and v121. If you have v121 you have the latest version.

You might be able to correct the problem by configuring your BIOS. Check how your BIOS has your IDE controller(s) ordered. Check the BIOS disk geometry to be sure that is correct. On my secondary controller I can configure its BIOS by hitting <cntrl> <H>. It is unlikely, but possible, that you can configure the onboard HPR 370 by hitting <cntrl> <H>.

None of this information solves your problem, per se, but it may help you figure out what the problem is.


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Steve Stites

My Highpoint controller is not an add-on card. Its embedded in the motherboard. This means I have to use my manufacture's BIOS utility to seperatly update the controller. I can not find the instructions how to do it. ABIT had the link to the instructions but they took it off.

My Highpoint BIOS is version 0.93. It detected my hard drive as a 50 gigabyte (47683.71 megabytes) but LINUX detected the full capacity of 120 gigabyte. It works with out any problems.

For my first question I'm trying to find the post that describe my problem very well. I think they fixed by sending a kernel command like a no raid option. I can not find it in the kernel document.

Anybody know some options to force the kernel to not look for an array raid on a particular controller.

jailbait, thanks for your post.

I answered my first question by placing hdg=noprobe and hdf=noprobe in the append line in lilo.conf. It worked.

I can not find any information for the second question. Does anybody know?

Sorry bumping post.