RocketRAID 1640 doesn't boot

**Gollo** · April 12th, 2004, 09:31 AM

Ok well I got all the stuff for the server. Gigabyte board, AMD proc, half a gig of memory, two seagate 120gb sata drives and a highpoint rocketraid 1640 sata raid (pci). So I power the thing on and set in the bios to boot from scsi like it says in the manual and it continues on and lets me into the cards bios so I can create the arrays. All that good stuff. I boot my gentoo live cd and it finds the card and detects the drives and all is well. I have a successful install of gentoo but when it's time to reboot it get's past the bios and then sits there for like 10-15 seconds and doesn't boot. It eventually times out and tries to boot from the cd but even if I change the boot order (cd, floppy, hd vs. hd,cd,floppy etc) it still hangs for those 10-15 seconds. If I don't have a cd or floppy in the drive it will just sit there. When I first installed them it would give me a none bootable system disk error which was to be expected but now after the install it just sits there. My first install I created a raid 1 array and it wouldn't boot so I thougth maybe it didn't like the raid so I deleted the array and installed on a single disk with the same results. I don't think the OS is at fault here. It seems like a bios problem. Anybody got any input on this type of thing (getting hd to boot off of a third party controller and not built in)? Thanks.

**ilovetheusers** · April 12th, 2004, 10:24 AM

Do the drives work on the boards built in IDE on the board? If so then perhaps the rocketraid card is bad. Also, what slot is it in, try moving it and make sure it's not a shared IRQ thing.

**Gollo** · April 12th, 2004, 12:16 PM

No sata on the mobo so I can't try plugging in the drives. I did try moving pci slots but had the same results. I even disabled pretty much everything on board (nic, usb, ide, etc) to make sure it wasn't an irq conflict (because it showed it shareing the irq with the nic and usb controler). I have it in slot two because the fan on the video card sticks out a ways and it is really close if the card is in slot one. I did move it to slot one for testing but got the same results so I moved it back. Maybe I'll try the last slot. Thanks.

**Gollo** · April 12th, 2004, 06:59 PM

Well a little bit of an update. I was finally able to get the cards bios updated by disconnecting the two drives. The 10-15 seconds of nothing now are 2-3 so we are now reinstalling gentoo and we'll see if it boots.

**Gollo** · April 13th, 2004, 07:49 AM

Victory!! The bios update did the trick. The system now boots. And dumb me tried a new filesystem and doesn't know how to get it to work so it looks like we will be installing yet again. (Anybody know the reiser file system?

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