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No Boot from Promise SATA Controller

946 views 0 replies 1 participant last post by  Troy_Jollimore 
#1 ·
Well, I'm out of ideas. I'm hoping someone here may have seen something like this before...

Our 'server' has an Asus NCCH-DL workstation motherboard. The boot drives were Raptor 36GB SATAs run in RAID1 on the onboard Promise SATA controller. An onboard Intel SATA controller is also present. Data drives are SCSI running off an Adaptec PCI-X controller.

Everything was fine until it crashed one day last year. The system wouldn't boot (I forget if I have a thread on here about it or not) past the BIOS screen no matter what I tried. An outside tech had the idea of plugging one of the drives into the Intel controller, and this got the system far enough along that an in-place upgrade of Server 2003 got the system going again, albeit quite a bit slower. It's been running that way since...

I've just spent the weekend trying to get the RAID1 back into operation with no joy. I even grabbed two mis-matched SATA drives that I had extra, built a RAID1 on the Promise with those, and then used Symantec's Backup Exec Server Recovery to 'Ghost' a copy of the system drive onto the new array. No boot. I then tried a new install of Server 2003 to that array. No boot. So I cleared the array totally (no trace of the Raptor's MBR configuration), set another one up new, and did another new install of Server 2003. NO...BOOT. It just sits there after the BIOS screen's 'DMI setting' and blinks the cursor at me.

This doesn't make sense on a 'new' install with 'new' drives, especially when the array shows up perfectly fine when Windows is booted from the Intel controller! Does anyone have any suggestions to what my next step should be? I can't see what could be stopping it from doing something as basic as booting... (And yes, the FastTrak array IS set as the first boot device.)
 
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