At 07:32 AM 4/16/2000, Ding Marcelo wrote:
>have the ABIT bios select to boot from "SCSI " as you mentioned
>and yet it still boot to IDE 1 hard disk.

Hi Ding

When you set your BE6 to "External, C, A", did you go further
and set "External" to "SCSI"? I don't have a BE6 but I read
that there is a pop up submenu where you must specify what
"External" refers to.

Understand that if something is wrong with the boot status of
the SCSI drive, the IDE drive will then take over and boot.
Since this is what's happening...

Have you checked your Tekram SCSI BIOS utility to be sure that
it's set to boot off the correct SCSI drive? Of course this
specified drive must have a bootable partition (an operating
system on a partition marked active).

I would use FDISK (it should be on the Win98 startup disk) to
mark the primary partition on the IDE drive as "inactive" and
*then* mark the SCSI drive's primary partition as "active".
The order you do this might be important. (It will be
confusing telling which drive is which in FDISK! Better go
by drive sizes.)

At this point, the system must boot off the SCSI drive...or
it won't boot at all. If that were to happen (no boot), you'd
learn that you have a SCSI problem.

If you disable the IDE drives (in the BE6 BIOS), will the SCSI
drive boot? If so, once Win98 loads in protected mode (the GUI)
it may *re-enable* the IDE controllers and still let you use
the IDE drives...even though they were not available at boot
time due to the disabled controller. Whether the IDE is
re-enabled or not, trying this will at least tell you whether
the SCSI drive is bootable under the ideal condition of no IDE
devices at all.

I read somewhere that if you have drives on the HPT Ultra66
controller, you can't boot from SCSI. Why? Maybe the HPT
uses a memory range needed by the Tekram? Who knows? But I
did read in the "alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.abit" newsgroup
where several people claim that you must actually disable
the HPT controller to boot from SCSI. (You may have trouble
disabling the HPT controller.) But maybe these people had
IRQ problems between the HPT66 and SCSI.

Another question... When you boot off the IDE drive, does
the SCSI drive work properly (by that I mean without being
in MSDOS Compatibility Mode)? Is the SCSI card "working
properly" in Device Manager...without sharing an IRQ? The
SCSI controller must be in a slot with its own IRQ.
Busmastering devices cannot be in PCI slots that are hard
wired to share an IRQ line with another PCI slot...unless
that other slot is empty of course. You might try moving the
Tekram to another slot. Don't put it in PCI slot 1 or 3, or
in 4 if 5 is used (and visa versa)...to avoid IRQ problems.
(Check your BE6 manual to see which slots share IRQs in case
I am wrong with the slot numbers. I call slot 1 the slot
next to the AGP slot. Slot 5 would be near the ISA slot.)

Maybe there is a bug in your BE6 BIOS. (In that case you
might try a different BIOS version from Abit. I have read
that some people can boot SCSI using one Abit BIOS version
but not another. But flashing your motherboard BIOS is
risky business.

Finally... You said the extended partition on the SCSI drive
was "D" and the logical drives had drive letters "E" and
"F". I don't understand this because the logical drives
should have the drive letters...not the extended partition
itself. (This is only a place holder for the logical drives.)
If you really see "D" as the extended partition, this is a
sign that something's wrong. (I've see this and there was
always a problem with the drives and/or their partitions.)

Regards,
Bill

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