Re: RAID controllers - BIOS conflict - pls help

On Sun, 21 May 2006 00:10:29 GMT, "nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx"
<mygarbage2000@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 18 May 2006 02:13:17 GMT, "nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx"
<mygarbage2000@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 16 May 2006 07:23:42 -0400, George Macdonald
...snip...
Huh? I haven't seen that in my MSI adventures - in fact, although their
instructions say to boot from floppy, they say *not* to run Flash from the
floppy and recommend strongly to run the flash from a hard drive (FAT,
FAT32) or from a Win98 Startup RAMDRIVE (NTFS). You should be OK booting
from a USB flash drive, though I've never tried it. See here
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/serveroptions/us/download/20306.html
for a utility to create a bootable USB flash drive, though it needs a
source for the DOS boot files.

Maybe this is an aberration of the memory. Even if they don't say
this now, they used to. Or maybe some other place - like the mobo
manual, not even necessarily the manual for this mobo. I didn't
invent the idea that floppy is a must for flashing BIOS, honestly.
But thanks for the idea to boot from USB - this may be an easy way
out, though not without risk - as in the thread you started recently.
Flashing from a corrupt USB drive may be fatal. However I've seen a
lot more dude floppies than flash drives ;-)
Promise still silent (I don't take for an answer the autoreply that
they received my request) - that much for customer service. Looks
like I am doomed to try and flash that beta BIOS.

NNN

Flashed 1.35 (beta) - didn't fix the issue, but win2k would bluescreen
just before inviting to ctrl-alt-del to log on. Would boot only safe
mode. Reflashing 1.1 fixed the Windows, but still have issues with
RAIDs.

Just another thought: did you try turning off BIOS shadowing/caching to see
if that affects the conflict with Promise? Of course one would *think*
that PnP would be mature enough now to have fixed issues like this... and
they've taken away the jumpers which allowed manually choosing address
mapping umm, because PnP is supposed to err, "work". Lose on the
swings.... lose on the roundabouts.<shrug>

Another thought: the BIOS in my MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum seems to have a hook
at d000:0 which hints at being for USB. On the off-chance that your mbrd
is done by the same BIOS writers and that the USB hook is for booting from
a USB drive, you might try turning off USB support completely to see if
that leaves a slot for Promise to take.

As a side note: an old IDE HDD (under 1GB - don't even understand why
I forgot to throw it away) that already had old win95 system on it was
perfect as a flashing device - I only had to hit F8 and pick Safe mode
- Command prompt option to prevent win95 from trying to start GUI.

Looks like this is my last MSI board. :-( Will be shopping Asus or
Tyan for the next one.

MSI is usually pretty good with BIOS updates for their desktop boards...
but it looks like their committment to server is a bit weak - that board
has been around long enough now to be fixed.

You might want to check willbill's thread e4p18e0vh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with
his experience of SuperMicro - they look like they might be getting close
to coming out of the closet on their AMD mbrds.:-)

--
Rgds, George Macdonald
.

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