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wega1985

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SCSI drives not available in Windows XP Setup despite supplementing with driver floppy

I am attempting to reformat a workstation and having trouble with the LSI 53C1030 SCSI controller.  I upgraded the Tyan BIOS (S2895UA2NRF) to the latest version, and downloaded and tried 2 different sets of SCSI drivers for 32-bit Windows XP Pro installation.

I can verify that the hard drive actually is detected by the SCSI controller, and it even attempts to boot the old corrupt OS.  However, when I boot to the Windows XP SP3 disc, hit F6 and load the additional drivers, all that shows up are 4 unknown drives.

Prior to upgrading the BIOS the drives would show up.  Possibly I am missing some settings in this server-ish BIOS that I'm less than familiar with?  Reading the notes of the BIOS upgrades and being 6 or so versions behind, it made sense to upgrade to the latest to ensure compatibility with the latest NVidia NForce drivers.  I had a heck of a time getting the BIOS upgraded with the WinPhlash utility, so there is a possibility that went awry, but everything seems fine except for the missing drives in XP setup.
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Besides, any bad block it remaps from a spare block might take up to 5 secs unless you have a high-end, modern SCSI disk, so better to do it now rather than wait until you are using your PC after the O/S is loaded ... assuming that problem has nothing to do with the HDD health, and is some obscure driver issue.

P.S. Upgrade SCSI firmware, and the fact that there are 2 drivers is of concern.  You should read the release notes for the firmware. Obviously at least one of the drivers you tried is either obsolete, or just plain incorrect.
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wega1985

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I probably should have given more background.  The PC was up and running  all day, with nothing to suggest the disk was corrupt.  I even ran  chkdsk in troubleshooting and that cleaned up its outstanding disk  issues.  
 
 I had tried a repair installation of Windows XP, and the drivers  provided on the motherboard website worked just fine.
 
 The repair install was problematic, so I decided to start fresh.
 
 This is when the BIOS update came into play.  After doing so, I was no  longer able to get the drive to display in XP setup.  (It's just one  drive, no RAID.)  So, I went to look for updated drivers.  I downloaded  some from LSI's website, which also didn't work.  They might have even  been an identical version, just packaged differently.
Yeah, under archived, though.  There was no 32-bit version for XP.
If there is no driver, then either the driver they had did not pass the MSFT certification suite (i.e, it munged up data), or they made business decision not to spend engineering resources maintaining the driver and fixing bugs.

So obviously, if you value your data, either run a supported O/S with proper drivers, or get a different controller.  It is just plain stupid to try to fool a storage driver into working.  

I doubt that even if you did get it to work, then you would spend days running data integrity tests while injecting errors to make sure nothing gets hosed :)

It would be different if it was a video driver.  You just don't mess with disk drivers because the risk/reward ratio is just off the charts.
Well the Tyan driver page doesn't support that argument, http://www.tyan.com/support_download_drivers.aspx?model=S.S2895, nor does the fact that it's ran Windows XP pro 32-bit perfectly fine since it was purchased.  

I wasn't trying to fool the storage driver into working, I just thought I possibly overlooked a setting in the newer BIOS, or I may have to possibly make changes in the LSI controller.
You are missing data from your post.  You see the drives listed, what options do you have? delete/create partition? Are you preloading both SCSI and SATA drivers just in case?
ftp://ftp.tyan.com/SCSI/LSI1030/WHQL_Certified/
ftp://ftp.tyan.com/drivers/Website%20Drivers/NVIDIA/Storage/SATA/Windows/32-bit/XP_32/v10.3.0.42/NVIDIA_CK804-Pro_SATA_v10.3.0.42_XP_32.zip

Did you expand/extract the drivers onto a floppy?

You may spare yourself future headaches by using the nliteos.net with windows service packs/updates and including all the drivers for this system into a single bootable install disk.
So this is an embedded controller, on the motherboard, not the card based on the controller?  Then you MUST get the driver from the motherboard manufacturer, and only your motherboard manufacturer.  The motherboards tweak things like changing default DMA addresses and interrupt numbers.  The generic driver from LSI is not  aware of such things.  If your motherboard maker does not have a driver then give up.
OK... Yes embedded controller.  The drives do not show up... unknown drive, I believe it says, as if I used no driver disk at all.  Yes extracted to floppy per instructions, selected and loaded by hitting F6, and eventually S to specify additional drivers.

ftp://ftp.tyan.com/SCSI/LSI1030/WHQL_Certified/ was the driver...
Check the controller to see under what setup/configuration the drivers are.
You may also need to preload the mother board chipset drivers.
Are the drives supposed to be seen individually or are they supposed to be setup in a RAID configuration?

Do you also preload the SATA Drivers just incase the drives you have are SATA rather than SCSI??
Use the BIOS to test and verify that the disks are OK.  Drivers will not affect it.  If the BIOS lets you format, verify, test disks and such, then you know for sure it is drivers.  Also, you could try booting a ubuntu liveCD and just letting it boot to the CDROM.  This will have drivers most likely, so you can verify the exact problem and not waste a lot of time going down the wrong path
wega1985,
That driver you listed in your last post is the correct driver; but, did you copy the files listed in symmpixp.txt to the root of the diskette?  The existing folder structure is wrong.
2nd, it was a bear to find; but, here is the Tyan SCSI manual: ftp://ftp.tyan.com/manuals/m_LSI_SAS_1068E.pdf
Most of it is bushwa; however, the most pertinent options are the Hook Interrupt and Terse messages on the Global properties page.  That hook interrupt should make it a standard in13h device so you could see it in MS-Dos.  The Terse messages, I'd change until I had the beast tamed.
As long as I was in the LSI SCSI Bios, I'd check the status and any raid settings that might be set on that drive.  If its only one drive, it had better be no raid.
And for others reading this thread, let's all start saying SCSI BIOS or SYSTEM BIOS, OK?  He has two separate BIOSes with completely different functions.