Help Dual P4 rig wont boot without removable hard disk.

[Jimborae]

Help, Dual P4 rig wont boot without removable hard disk.

This is a work pc that should boot off the scsi op system hard disk. But once a removable hard drive has been added & then removed it will no longer boot up off the scsi controller. It errors saying no operating system present. i.e. its trying to boot off the removeable drive even though in the bios settings its set for booting of the scsi drive.

Anybody got any ideas, also while i'm competent with normal non scsi systems, scsi & removeable hard drives are new to me so please keep things simple. :)

Also dont ask me for system specs as I didn't build it so I dont know the motherboard make.

Thanks


Jim

[Shorty]

Jim..

I know you didn't say you built it but..

Is there a chance the OS was installed with the removable disk in it??

I had a similar slipup on my rig @ home. Installed Windows with the removable in and Windows wrote boot files to it. Once the disk was removed, the machine refused to boot off the RAID array.

Similar scenario?

[Jimborae]

Hi Shorty,

No, no chance at all, the system will boot with any removeable disck in it, blank formatted or unformated. It just wont boot when theres no removeable disk present.

By the way the system is a HP Workstation XW8000.

Regards

Jim

[Shorty]

That's a new one on me.

Checking through the BIOS options, is there any other option besides SCSI? Any other strange boot menu options?

/me grasps @ straws

[Shorty]

primesuspect will be awake soon. Il drop him a PM to hassle him to check this thread ;)

[Jimborae]

Thanx mate.

The bios boot options are limited. Surprisingly there is no option to boot first from scsi. All the boot options are in a list called boot order. From there you place to top of the list the order in which you wish to boot whether it be on scsi controller or ide.

In this case the order is :

Fujitsu 36gb scsi
Seagate 137gb scsi
Seagate 137gb scsi
Seagate 137gb scsi
Seagate 137gb scsi
CdRom
Network
Maxtor 251gb (this is the removeable drive)

The wierd thing is that when the removable hard drive is out & it wont boot the Fujitsu drive diappears from the boot list but is still detected in the bios boot up sequence.

Wierd nes pas??

Regards

Jim

[Jimborae]

I'm gonna try fashing to the latest bios to see if that helps.

[primesuspect]

That is bizarre. I would have said 99% certain that shorty was right the first time around - that Windows has mention of the removable in the boot.ini or something. But you said it'll boot with -any- removable drive in? Blank or otherwise? That is so weird and I'll admit that I've never encountered this before.

/me starts googling.

[Hotrodsun]

Are you running the drives off of two controller cards? If so did you set up the boot order for each card. I know, my adaptec card has boot order for up to 4 different cards. But I only got one card so it defaults to 1st.

[Jimborae]

Hi guys,

There's no scsi controller card or ide, its all onboard controllers. The scsi seagate drives are set up in a raid 1 configuration & the scsi fujitsu is on its own with the op system (XP pro) on it. Like I said the removable drives are blank, some are partitioned, aome are unformatted.

Its wierd alright, speaking to one of IT guys today, he reckoned that the fujitsu drives are experiencing some hardware conflicts. There is new firmware out for it so we'll see what flashing the bios & firmware does for it.

Regards


Jim

[WuGgaRoO]

can it fold???

[Geeky1]

lol @ WuG... no, it can't fold- it's not booting silly! ;D

Aaanyhow, just a shot in the dark- have you tried clearing the CMOS and re-doing the settings?

[Jimborae]

yep done clear cmos, I'll wait till tomorrow & flash the f*cker. :)

[Geeky1]

Here's an idea (it always works with my computers)... tell it that if it doesn't start working properly, you're going to chuck it out the nearest 2nd or 3rd story window... :D

[Geeky1]

Some guest was viewing this thread earlier (I was browsing "who's online", and it got me reading it again.. Just out of curiosity, did you ever get this one sorted?

[mmonnin]

And a dual P4??

[Geeky1]

P4 Xeon, I'm sure. :)

[Gobbles]

Yes did you get this sorted out... Id be interested in the solution.

Gobbles