Author Topic: Question about SATA drives  (Read 8155 times)

David Hart

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Question about SATA drives
« on: February 05, 2017, 11:04:59 pm »
I am running into a strange issue when I attempt to add a second SATA drive.  I have been using OS/2 since Warp 3 and for years have been setting up systems booting to OS/2, Windows and Linux on the same box. More recent versions of operating systems seem to be more picky about what partition they get installed on.

On this particular box it had a single drive on it with Windows 7 on it and I first attempted to add a second SATA drive to install eCS 2.2 for now and later install ArcaOS 5.0 on it.  When I attempted to pick the drive to install the OS, the LVM would not recognize that drive.  I then unplugged the cable from from the Windows 7 drive and plugged it into a 500 Gig SATA drive and I was able to install it successfully.  In the past, eCS didnt seem to care that the drive moved to a different position.

This time, when I attempt to plug the Windows 7 drive in or if I add first SATA with the eCS (with Air-Boot) and a second blank drive, the boot hangs when it gets do the DANI driver.  I am thinking that perhaps that driver is older and the issue may go away when I get ArcaOS.  Is there an update to the LVM or one of the DANI drivers that might solve this?

thanks,
Dave


ivan

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Re: Question about SATA drives
« Reply #1 on: February 06, 2017, 12:40:31 am »
Did you use DFSee to setup the additional drive and give it the LVM information?

Did you install win 7 in a single partition or did it do the normal install and have a small hidden boot partition?

Both of those things can cause problems when trying to boot multiple OSs.  I don't know about air-boot, never used it, but bootmamager does need to know which partition has the OS boot information.  If your win 7 has the hidden partition that could change the drive letter assignment and so cause problems with OS/2 finding the files it need to complete the boot process. 

Dave Yeo

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Re: Question about SATA drives
« Reply #2 on: February 06, 2017, 09:13:03 pm »
Hi David, What type of MB? Some MBs have more then one SATA controller, possibly Dani only supports some of your SATA plugins, have you tried others, assuming there is more then 2 on the MB?
Have you looked in the BIOS to see if there are different ways to configure them? Some newer computers (most?) need the AHCI driver instead of the Dani driver. If you have the AHCI driver, order in config.sys can matter.

David Hart

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Re: Question about SATA drives
« Reply #3 on: February 12, 2017, 05:09:03 am »
Did you use DFSee to setup the additional drive and give it the LVM information?

Did you install win 7 in a single partition or did it do the normal install and have a small hidden boot partition?

Both of those things can cause problems when trying to boot multiple OSs.  I don't know about air-boot, never used it, but bootmamager does need to know which partition has the OS boot information.  If your win 7 has the hidden partition that could change the drive letter assignment and so cause problems with OS/2 finding the files it need to complete the boot process.

Ivan,
I used LVM from the installer.  This is a 7 year old HP and I attempted to leave the original drive with Windows 7 on it.  I wanted to plug a second drive in but LVM had problems reading that drive when it was in the second position (total 4 SATA drives on the MB).

I then plugged the drive on the first position and was able to install two installs of eCS 2.2 along with the AIR Boot.  Later when I plugged in other drives, Air boot saw them but when booting any of the OS's it would hang when getting to the DANI driver. Seems like it is this that has the problem.

Thanks for your suggestion.

David Hart

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Re: Question about SATA drives
« Reply #4 on: February 12, 2017, 05:19:06 am »
Hi David, What type of MB? Some MBs have more then one SATA controller, possibly Dani only supports some of your SATA plugins, have you tried others, assuming there is more then 2 on the MB?
Have you looked in the BIOS to see if there are different ways to configure them? Some newer computers (most?) need the AHCI driver instead of the Dani driver. If you have the AHCI driver, order in config.sys can matter.

Hi Dave,
This is a 7 year old HP.  The MB does have 4 plugins.  When I plugged a drive to position 2, the installer had problems seeing that drive.  So, I plugged it into the first position just to see if it would install. It did install and I had 2 partitions that both booted as long as they were on the same drive.

When I plugged in another drive, Air-Boot detected it and displayed all the partitions, but attempting to boot would hang once it got to the DANI driver, so it seems that is probably what is wrong. I guess I should try installing with the AHCI driver instead.

Thanks for your suggestion.

David Hart

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Re: Question about SATA drives
« Reply #5 on: February 14, 2017, 04:35:01 am »
Its been a while since I re-used an old PC with spare drives.  The last time I did this was with EIDE drives.  With lots of spare drives, I did install ECS with different partitioning schemes so I know which one I want when I get ArcaOS.  I dont know if ArcaOS will handle larger drives better or not complain about partitioning other OS's do.

I tried today to install and pic SATA drive which I did see in the ECS 2.2 Installer, but I ran into the issue with how Windows partitions the drives complaining about the end of the drive.  I remember before that when I said "fix the errors" (or what ever it says) it did not fix them so I could not put the AIR-BOOT manager from the ECS 2.2 installer.

After that I just plugged Windows drive in the first cable and then the large ECS drive on the second cable thinking I would wait a few weeks and see.  I then realized that the BIOS on this box has an option to select a drive to boot and with this I can boot between Windows and ECS 2.2. 

Pressing ESC at boot up isn't that bad.  I may try swapping the cables and putting AIR-BOOT on the ECS drive and then add windows and see if that works but for now this solution is doable.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Doug Bissett

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Re: Question about SATA drives
« Reply #6 on: February 14, 2017, 04:40:55 pm »
Quote
I tried today to install and pic SATA drive which I did see in the ECS 2.2 Installer, but I ran into the issue with how Windows partitions the drives complaining about the end of the drive.

I have one test machine with a 1 TB drive. ECS 2.2b2 will install anywhere on the disk, BUT you must do the partitioning (including the windows partition) with miniLVM, LVM, or DFSEE (must be run under OS/2). Windows must not be allowed to to the partitioning, or it is not compatible with OS/2 (including ArcaOS). I am not sure, but you may also need to use AHCI. I didn't try it with the Dani driver.

What I did, when I replaced the 500 GB drive, was do backups of everything (including windows), put the new disk in, then I booted the eCS 2.2b2 DVD, and did the partitioning for all of it, with miniLVM. Then, I restored all of it, making sure that windows never touched the partitioning. That part can be tricky, because windows thinks it owns the world. The windows backup tool, that I used, was the Seagate Disk Wizard, which is actually a reduced function version of Acronis (which is the only windows backup program, that I know of,  that does it properly). That program does require a Seagate drive (can be in a USB enclosure), but it is free. After that, eCS cooperated. Since then, I have installed ArcaOS a couple of times, with no troubles, that I didn't cause myself.

I will also note, that I put a 2 TB SATA drive into an older machine, that didn't have SATA support. I used a 4 Port PCI SATA RAID Controller Adapter Card (PCISATA4R1) which does not support AHCI. I still boot from an old 40 GB IDE disk, and I use the 2 TB disk to store my backups. it is effectively an OS/2 based NAS box, and it works very well with OS/2, windows (XP, 7 and 10), and I have used it with Linux Mint.