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Dell OptiPlex GXa won't boot; how to configure devices in SCSI BIOS
- Thread starter Bill-kun
- Start date
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Must be something in your motherboard BIOS. I use SCSI and IDE/SATA hard drives all the time in the same systems.
Sorry it didn't work out for you.
Sorry it didn't work out for you.
I need to use this computer to examine about 150 salvage IDE hard drives, seeing if they are usable, including copying off anything needed.
Plus, it came to the point where I couldn’t even get the SCSI card to recognize both the SCSI CD-ROM and the SCSI HDD simultaneously.
Why not just use an IDE to USB dock for that? Are the IDE drives pre LBA (under 500mb)?
Okay, so it's an IDE test bench. So why even dabble with SCSI then?
Yes, almost all of them.
My original vision for this computer was the "able to access anything" computer: from 360 kB. floppies to 1.44 MB. floppies to IDE to SCSI to USB to CD-ROM to an external SCSI double Bernoulli drive. I'll just have to put the SCSI stuff in another circa 2000 computer.
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I always liked NT 4.0 setup on a SCSI drive with the Adaptec 2904 controller. 4.0 It okay as long as you don't crave a lot of USB. Might talk myself into doing it again in the near future.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Adaptec 2904? Do you perhaps mean the Adaptec AHA-2940? Win2K is also a nice compact, stable release for older systems.
I hate to admit it, but I'm slightly dyslexic, not in the usual context, such as reading, but in typing and speaking. It's not unusual for me to blurt out with "cuppy coff" instead of "coffee cup". Yes, of course I meant the 2940.
Update: Thanks to an in-person user group meeting, we concluded that the SCSI card that the OptiPlex GXa came with from Computer Reset had some unknown hardware failure. We replaced it with an identical model that I bought from eBay and that should work, but it needs drivers. We found the drivers on the Internet, but a third SCSI card I had needs no drivers, so I installed that since it is more robust. Boom; it works!
This seems a trivial solution as I report it this way, but trust, me, it is not. I don't know which SCSI cards do what or how, or what they need to do it. Guiding toward the solution today was a step-by-step question-plus-trial process that could only be done in-person. So computer user groups are still relevant.
Thank your local organizer if you have one.
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