Unable to boot from a drive connected through an Acard 6280M

[Bunsen]

user's guides are downloadable / I'll be selling some 6880Ms / I'm still trying to find the top of my workbench though.

Hah! I'm still trying to find my workbench!

I'll check out the user guide. Consider me in the queue for one when they're available. Ta.

[superpantoufle]

Ok, just to keep you helpful fellows updated, it's been almost two weeks, and the 9500 boots fine under OS 9 and OS X either from the card or the internal bus. It's pretty easy, once you know (and remember!) which disk has been formatted where!

Thanks to all!

[trag]

Resurrecting this old thread.

So after my confident pronouncements about formatting the drive with the Acard solving problems -- which it seems to have for the original poster -- I find that I have the same problem as the original poster.

I have an S900 logic board, which is essentially a PM8500 or PM9500.

It has an array of three striped SCSI drives with various boot volumes on an Initio card.

It has a 40 GB IDE drive on Channel 1 of the Acard 6280M. Channel 1 is shared with a DVD-ROM drive.

I recently added a pair of Seagate 160 GB ST3160815A drives to Channel 2 of the Acard.

Everything is formatted with SoftRAID 2.2 and my primary OS is 9.1, although some of those SCSI boot volumes go back as far as 7.6.1.

I created several Mirrored volumes on the pair of 160 GB drives. The volumes with OSs on them are all 1 GB in size and initialized as HFS Standard, not +.

And I cannot get the darned machine to boot from any of the volumes on the 160 GB drives. They're selectable in "Start-up Disk". I also tried de-mirroring one of them and booting from the singleton, thinking there was some problem with mirrored volumes. But that didn't make any difference.

I can boot from an OS9.1 volume on the 40 GB IDE drive (also connected to the Acard) and I can boot from my various SCSI (Initio) boot volumes. But the 160 GB drives refuse to be bootable.

Hunting around, it looks like some things for me to check are whether my Acard firmware is up to date -- although that update is only supposed to be needed for partitions larger than 120 GB, and these boot partitions are 1 GB even if the drives are bigger.

I should also check that the drive I jumpered as master is on the correct connector on the IDE cable and similarly for the Slave.

But as long as I was hunting the web for wisdom and Google dropped me off here, I figured I'd post my predicament.

Has anyone heard of any issues with this model of Seagate drive? I think that they were pulls from a Dell server (bought them on Ebay) and I've heard of server companies doing some unnatural things to drive firmware....

Thank you for any helpful or humorous suggestions.

[trag]

Almost a year later, I found the answer. The 6280M was installed in a Umax S900 logic board in one of the lower slots. I was overjoyed, years ago, to discover that the 6280M worked trouble-free in any of the lower four slots of the S900.

Apparently, that's not completely true. When SoftRAID is used to create Mirrored volumes of disks connected to the 6280M, the volumes are not bootable, unless the 6280M is in one of the two upper slots of the S900. Weird, but there it is.

Umax screwed the pooch more than a decade ago by using a PCI-PCI Bridge to implement the lower four PCI slots, and it causes all kinds of trouble in those machines.

When the 6280M is installed in an upper slot, mirrored drives boot fine.