Question : Problem: Sata Controller to SATA Sony Tape Device

Hi All,
I am hoping that someone can help me out.... We have a Proliant 310 ML Server G4.  It is brand new.  We purchased a Sony AIT 100 tape drive with a SATA connection.  Unfortunately, the drive would not work with the embedded SATA controller.  So we purchased an Addonics controller that was tested by sony for these drives.  My I installed the controller and it worked fine.  WHen I added the tape drive to the controller, I can get windows to boot.  After it goes through all of the bios devices (RAID card and SATA card) it sticks on the HP Ethernet boot agent.  Usually, this only is displayed for a second.  If I uplug the tape drive from the addonics controller, Boot up is fine.  So I went into the bios and made sure that the HP raid card and the addonics Sata card were on different IRQs.  After doing that, I still have the same problem.  If the tape drive is plugged into the Addonics Sata card, the system will not boot.  

Here is the interesting part... Support at Addonics had me boot to windows and then connect the Sata Tape Device to their card.  Windows Found the device!  I was very surprised.

Obviously, if I can not boot the server with the device plugged in, it is useless.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Scott

Answer : Problem: Sata Controller to SATA Sony Tape Device

I had the same issue with an Intel based server. Installed the Addonics card no problem, system booted fine, detected card, drivers installed. Connected the sony sata tape drive and OS detected and installed no problem. When system rebooted the Addonics card bios detected the drive but the system hung just before booting the OS. I eventually came to the conclusion that the BIOS of the motherboard was seeing the tape drive as a fixed drive and checking its capability to boot and getting confused, soI tried connecting a SATA hard drive to Port 1 of the addonics card, and the tape drive to Port 2, and voila, the system boots fine with the tape drive attached. I assume this is something that will be fixed in future motherboard BIOS updates, but for now the solution works for me. Although I now have the problem that all my backups fail, but I believe this to be a software problem which I am currently investigating. Let me know if this helps for you. I also tried the Adaptec 1220SA card but unfortunately this was totally incompatible with my motherboard and caused the system to hang at bootup with or without a drive attached.