Switching storage Controllers - now BIOS settings issue

crystalcat67 · Mon Aug 17, 2009 5:01 am

I have a Compaq Presario SR2050NX that I've debugged and determined that the onboard HD controller is bad. I bought a Sabrent PCI SATA card to try and use without reinstalling windows on the HD. I followed the directions on install the controller and it wasn't working to boot the primary drive.

I have an identical Presario unit, so I thought I'd use it to double check the config on it because the motherboard is solid. I loaded the Windows Sabrent driver on this second unit onto the hard drive using onboard controller while stand up card was installed with no drives. Then powered down, plugged my drive in the standup controller and booted up. I get a black screen with a blinking cursor when trying to boot anything - windows or diags partition.

I disabled the onboard SATA controllers and the primary IDE in the BIOS just to see if I could get this controller to boot as primary. It sees my seagate 250 gb HD as drive 0 in the BIOS, but it doesn't list this card anywhere that I can see. It just displays the Sabrent bios (Silicon Image) and then has a black screen with a blinking cursor.

I also checked the F4 Raid util on the card, and it sees the drive as well. I'm not using a raid setup or config, just 0.

I've tried to make sure it's first to boot, but no luck.

It has a RC410-M (Asterope3) Motherboard,
and AMI BIOS 3.17 07/26/06 Core version 08.00.12
BIOS string: 63-0100-000001-000101111-072606-RS400-RC410-M-YZKC

What setting am I getting wrong? I saw no jumpers on the standup card - it has two connection ports. Is there any util that I can see what's going on with the BIOS? I enabled it display diags when booting up but didn't get enough info.

Thank you for any help on this

Cat

Mon Aug 17, 2009 9:03 pm

The add-on PCI card needs to have its own bios in order to be able to boot from it. without it the disks attached can only be used as storage. note, cards with bios are more expensive.

crystalcat67 · Tue Aug 18, 2009 4:34 am

That make's sense, I'm not sure what it has. The instructions that came with the card show how to install a bootable drive, also if I press F4 it goes into the "bios" of the card and allows me to set up RAID. The only thing it's really lacking are any clues on how to configure it in my MOBO bios. I'm assuming it has it's own bios. Their support has not gotten back with me yet.