420 Won't boot into XP from SCSI wide HD when SCSI narrow HD is attached.

Question

My 420 w/A13 boots XP Pro fine from the SCSI ultra160 18 gig hooked to the narrow A channel but when I hook 1 or more hard drives into the B channel on the board, XP won't boot. The B channel drive's LED comes on and stays on when XP tries to boot like the machine wants to boot from both drives at the same time. after POST the screen goes black and stays there. I tried every jumper setting. Is there some simple setting in the bios or SCSI bios to fix this?

John Carrol · Answer

I think I may have come up with the answer to my own question. The info I gave first was incorrect.    XP boots from a SCSI wide HD alone hooked into the wide A channel on the mobo or while a SCSI narrow HD is hooked into the narrow B channel on the mobo, but not while a SCSI wide HD is hooked with adapter into the narrow B channel on the mobo. The BIOS recognizes and identifies the SCSI wide HD with adapter during POST, but locks up at boot. I guess the answer is:   I just can't use SCSI wide hard drives on the SCSI narrow controller.

waynesa98 · Answer

A few things to consider.   There are 2 bios you need to deal with to boot from scsi disks/cd's.  1 is the main mobo bios, 2 is the scsi bios (ctl A if I remember correctly)  in the scsi bios you can force narrow mode, change the boot channel (a or b), sync speed, termination etc, as well as verify the disk media.    Default for the scsi boot is ch A device 0.  Also you might want to make sure that you don't have 2 devices with the same id on the same channel as that make cause problems as well.   PS with u2 drives on ebay can be gotten for $20.  You might want to consider scapping a narrow HD for something a bit bigger and faster.  The last st150176lc drive I got was $10 for a u2(80) 50gb (80 pin)

John Carrol · Answer

Thanks for the reply. I will check out your suggestion. In the meantime, I hooked up a small narrow SCSI HD on that narrow B channel that is taking care of the page file and seems to work OK.

Storage, Drives & Media

Was this post helpful?