asked on 5/8/2006

Connected IDE Drive to IBM X205 but no love

We have an old X series 205 Server using SCSI disks

bought a 200Gb IDE drive for storage but no matter what we try the machine only sees 130Gb and by default tries to boot from the IDE drive!

any suggestions, tried BIOS updates, checked everywhere in the bios for boot priorities and now we are stumped!

any ideas?

Hardware

Last Comment

Jay_Jay70

5/9/2006

5/8/2006

You could try getting a PCI IDE card to hook the drive to. This will let the system see the 200gigs, and it sounds like the system won't try to boot from it. Make sure boot is turned off in the card bios. But you also need the OS to have 48-bit addressing to see it also.

Jay_Jay70

5/8/2006

ASKER

Gday Coral,

its an option for sure, but i am struggling to understand why it doesnt work as is! the machine is old but no ancient and i know that you can have IDE and SCSI on the same board together

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5/8/2006

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Jay_Jay70

5/8/2006

ASKER

you would be :)

IBM in their infinite wisdom seem to customise the BIOS to their spec which to put it bluntly is crap. I think you would be correct with your size limit assumption, and the board is old enough that it only has one IDE channel

we tried everything! making it slave, trying to hide it etc, but the board defaults to IDE boot no matter what,

you reckon its just one of those things we accept as a no go?

5/8/2006

>> just one of those things we accept as a no go? << Probably. Unless you want to see if the PCI card will fool it. As long as it is set to "Do not Boot" drives connected to it, the IDE drive should be hidden until the OS drivers kick in. <crosses fingers>

>> you would be << Yeah, Award is not usually known for having alot of bios options (though they are getting a little better), and add IBM on to that... well, enough said. : D

Jay_Jay70

5/8/2006

ASKER

spewin ey, ill leave this open for a little bit just to see if there have been any other attempts at a similar thing, otherwise its an attempt PCI card or an adapter to make it a NSD and we shall see

thanks for your help :)

5/8/2006

Sounds good. : )

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Gary Case

5/8/2006

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Gary Case

5/8/2006

... the external case suggestion does, of course, presume that you have USB ports on your X-Server :-) (or you could add a PCI USB card)

dooleydog

5/8/2006

when you use IDE and SCSI together, there should be a bios setting to tell your system to use SCSI to boot.

IF you cannot read all 200 GB using hte on board IDE, you may need to get an Enhanced IDE card that will allow you to see and use the whole drive.

Good Luck,

Jay_Jay70

5/8/2006

ASKER

Thanks all for the input looks like im off to buy a PCI card and have a play, also have network adapter for it on the way so we shall see how that works

shall bump the points up so you both get something worth while :)

Coral and Gary thankyou both, basically things like this jsut reaffirm my distaste for IBM products and their limited capabiliies

Thankyou Again and Happy Experting

See you boys around

Jay_Jay70

5/8/2006

ASKER

5/9/2006

Thank you much. : )

Something I thought of last night. The PCI card might also have a jumper to Disable its BIOS.
I know some of my SCSI card do, as well as not having a BIOS ROM at all. No way you can boot from them, since the OS has to be loaded for them to work.

If you get the chance, I would like to hear how it works out. : )

Jay_Jay70

5/9/2006

ASKER

shall let you know what we manage, drives in an Xseries206 at the moment and all seems to be well, PCI Card will be purchased in the next few days i hope