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Adding SATA Drives to a PowerEdge Server
I've added SATA controller cards and disks to several machines in the past without too much trouble. Mostly VIA cards. However, I've never done it with the intent of using the disks as the primary boot disks. I'm having issues with a 6300. Yeah it's a bit old but other than the scsi backplane (which has nitoriously died on many of the dell servers we have) it's still a nice box. What I'd like to do is have the disks on the SATA card used as the primary boot disks. The problem I'm having is the system doesn't see them when it boots up but does see them during the install.
Here's what I'm doing. I boot from the Windows 2003 CD and hit the F6 key just like I would if it was on the Perc. I pop in the driver floppy for the card and continue as normal. Windows comes up and I it sees the 2 hard drives I have on the card. I select the first disk and start the install with an NTFS format. It formats and copies all the files. However when it reboots it doesn't see the drives. It either goes straight to the CD to boot or tells me no boot disk found if I pop out the CD.
I've got all the latest firmware running including bios a13. In the bois, I've disabled the 2 primary scsi's and left the secondary scsi on (it's the cd rom). I've tried setting the PCI scan to all 3 options, embedded first, high to low and low to high. I've tried having the card in the top PCI slot and the bottom slot. It doesn't seem to want to give me any joy on this. Is there some kind of reason why the PCI scan is not picking up the card? Is there something I'm missing here?
Thanks
- You know, it's really anoying when dell doesn't respond to messages. Not only that but I've been searching all over for answers on this. I've seen many posts on here asking how to add SATA drives to systems and dell coming back with the standard comments of it won't work or it's not supported.Well, I figured it out on my own. Here's the thing. The VIA cards I use a lot don't have a card BIOS. Just like when you plug in a card like a PERC2 or Megatrends card to do your RAID, the cards have an onboard BIOS. Well, I happened to have an older PCI SATA card I got with a Maxtor drive years ago. It's only a 150 but at this point I'm not too picky. So here's the thing, I pop out the VIA and pop in the Maxtor. As the system is booting you see it go through the onboard SCSI's. What you're seeing is the onboard BIOS for those SCSI cards. Well just like SCSI cards do the Maxtor comes online and does it's little search for attached devices and see's my drives. I do my Win2k3 install and hit the F6 key just like I would for the SCSI cards. When it prompts I follow the standard steps of inserting the floppy with the drivers, hitting S, selecting the driver and then proceeding with the install. All is well and now I again have a functioning 6300. So all you out there trying to add SATA drives to your systems, this is the trick to getting it to work. Again, I've used several VIA SATA cards to add drives to the systems but if you want your systems to boot from those SATA drives make sure you get a card that has an onboard BIOS.
NetFodder
12 Posts
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Posted May 31st, 2007 18:00