I have an Intel motherboard L440GX, Pentium III 600 MHZ, with dual CPU. It has an Intel Boot Agent 4.0.17. with SCSI enabled

I press F2 after boot up, and the BIOS set-up did not recognize that there is an IDE hard drive in either IDE1 or IDE2
I tried with various hard drive like Maxtor, IBM but to no avail.
Could it be that the BIOS is the problem ?
The hard drive light did come up. The power cable and IDE is connected properly to the IDE port

The hard drive is in good condition.
The jumper select on the hard drive is master

Check the jumper(s) in your hard-drive, or the hard-drive could be fucked up!

WiZaC

You may need to turn on IDE support in BIOS. Mine allows disabling one or both IDE slots; yours might also. Double-check the jumpers, too - newer hard drives seem to have a couple different options for master; one of them may be "master with slave attached", the other "master only", so make sure it's set appropriately to your situation.

Hi wapcaplet
in BIOS setup. I did have it to auto detect IDE drive, but the BIOS did not see the hard drive. Hard drive setting is correct.

I had a motherboard do this once it ended up being because the mother board was just flakey, and I had to replace it. Have you tried your drives on another computer to make sure they are good?

Actually what I meant was the possibility of another configuration setting. In my BIOS, there's something to the effect of:

Primary IDE device: ENABLED/DISABLED
Secondary IDE device: ENABLED/DISABLED

The auto-detect thing will probably not find them if they are disabled by this config setting. Again, I don't know if you have this option, though. Check all your BIOS settings thoroughly to see if there's something else that might be disabling them.

Have IDE devices worked on that motherboard before?

Hi general4172 and wapcaplet.

This motherboard I have had an Intel boot agent. It is activated before I can even get into the BIOS setup. I think this boot agent may somehow disable the IDE port. For more information on this Intel boot agent go to

http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/network...ing_Procedures

Are you trying to say that the boot agent is bypassing the BIOS boot sequence and that you want to boot from IDE?

Or the BIOS can't detect the drive at all even using its drive setup configuration page?

Have you tried the control-s sequence to bypass boot agent?

the control-s sequence will bring up the boot agent. The boot agent has no option to turn on or to turn off the IDE port.

I agree. What I really want to know is are you trying to boot from IDE.

Yes. I want to boot from IDE drive. I pressed the F2 key, go into BIOS set-up but it did not detect the drive.

Lets start from the beginning:

How does the computer normally boot?

You mentioned SCSI enabled. Do you have local SCSI drive installed on the computer?

What operating system boots on the computer?

What is the motherboard boot sequence?

What configuration screens are you looking at in the the BIOS that says the IDE drive is not being recognized.

If you think the boot agent is a problem remove the network card.

Hi michaelk.

I removed the Network Interface Card (NIC), and when I boot up, and press F2 for BIOS-setup, the server can see the the hard drive and it can boot up from thehard drive.

After I removed the NIC, here is the boot up sequence

1 Adaptec AIC 7896 SCSI BIOS V2.57S2B3
2 Press <Ctrl> <A> for SCSI select utility!
cha, SCSI ID: 9 VA Linux Fulton 2 X 2 ASYN
3 It did boot up on the IDE drive. all is normal
=====================================

I reboot the server again

1 Adaptec AIC 7896 SCSI BIOS V2.57S2B3
2 I press Ctrl-A, go into the SCSI BIOS and diabled SCSI
3 reboot the computer
4 After reboot, the only message displayed was
cha, SCSI ID: 9 VA Linux Fulton 2 X 2 ASYN
5) Now. it reboot on the hard drive again
=====================================

Michaelk, I think now I can use the same NIC that I had just removed, and the server will still boot up on the IDE hard drive.
I think the NIC must be removed first before I can access the SCSI BIOS to disable it.

1) I think that the SCSI BIOS is in the BIOS motherboard itself, along with the conventional motherboard BIOS-setup
2) what about the Intel Boot agent. Where is it located ? Is it in the motherboard BIOS or the NIC ?
3) What is cha, SCSI ID: 9 VA Linux Fulton 2 X 2 ASYN ?
4) I have an adapter card that is connected to a PCI card. This adapter card allowed an NIC card to be positioned horizontally in the rack-mounted server. The adapter card has a factory label
"VA Linux Systems". How is it label has anything to do with the display when the server boot up
cha, SCSI ID: 9 VA Linux Fulton 2 X 2 ASYN ?

Thank you for your help

I think the SCSI controller is built in to the motherboard.

The boot agent is firmware built into the NIC.

Do you have anything connected to the SCSI controller?
cha SCSI ID9: refers to a device that is on the A controller with an ID of 9.

Hi michaelk. The server now detect the hard drive, but it takes nearly a minute before it could detect it. How can I fix it so that it won 't take that long. I did removed the network card, but it still take that long to detect the hard drive.