Fun with Acronis Recovery CD, BartPE plus ATI iso, and IDE vs SATA CD-ROM drives
Hi everyone,
Last night I had fun building my first ever BartPE CD using the 2009.9809 ATI iso plus my slipstreamed XP SP3 integration into my original XP SP2 CD. New to BartPE, I didn't think of adding the specific motherboard drivers (RAID and LAN) for my motherboard which uses the VIA 8380 chipset (southbridge is VIA VT8237). In particular, I didn't realize that I needed to add the RAID driver since in BIOS I have RAID turned off. With RAID turned off, my motherboard's BIOS apparently adds the SATA drives as EIDE drives onto an additional IDE#3 channel.
For my tests, I had my motherboard's BIOS configures as follows:
RAID -- Disabled
Plug&Play OS -- Disabled
Assign IRQ to VGA -- Enabled
USB support for DOS -- Fully Enabled (also adds support for USB drives)
BIOS Shadow -- Disabled
Things got interesting when testing both the Acronis Recovery and the BartPE/ATI CDs in my IDE and SATA CD-ROM drives. Neither CD will properly boot when placed in my SATA CD-ROM. They partially boot in the SATA CD-ROM drive, but then they crash (lock up), obviously when either CD tries to load generic drivers for accessing SATA drives. On the other hand, both CDs boot perfectly if I place either one in my IDE CD-ROM drive. In this latter case, all other drives including all attached SATA and USB drives can be seen and accessed perfectly fine by BartPE, by the Acronis Recovery CD, and by the Acronis ISO that I added to BartPE. So, apparently if you want to be able to boot from a SATA CD even if you have RAID turned off in your motherboard's BIOS, then no matter what you have to have an appropriate RAID driver installed into the bootable CD? I don't know. I am not by any means an expert regarding this stuff.
I then tried various BIOS settings to see if I could get either the Acronis Recovery CD or BartPE to successfully boot from the SATA CD-ROM drive. I tried everything I could think of such as turning off the secondary IDE channel, turning off EHCI for USB, changing I/O modes for the SATA drives, et cetera. Apparently the only thing which will work is for me to add the VIA RAID drivers to BartPE and burn another BartPE CD, or boot with either CD in my IDE CD-ROM drive.
All of this has lead me to an interesting hypothesis: If you can't get a vanilla BartPE CD to boot from your SATA CD-ROM drive without adding your motherboard's specific RAID drivers, then neither will the Acronis Recovery CD. It also occurs to me that maybe the Create Recovery CD function in ATI could ask you to either insert your third party RAID driver disk into the floppy drive or browse to the directory where the driver is located, so that your motherboard's specific RAID driver could be integrated into the Acronis Recovery CD? Again, just a thought since I am not an expert. In any event, it appears that you can successfully start the ATI Recovery CD if it is placed in an IDE versus a SATA CD-ROM drive. Maybe its time to dig out that older IDE CD-ROM, install it in your computer, and see if you can then successfully boot from the Acronis Recovery CD and be able to browse for backups on your SATA or USB drives? Or maybe the Acronis Recovery CD software could be modified to immediately copy itself to a ramdrive (ramdrive probably should be created as drive Z: to avoid conflicts with drive letters which get assigned to all detected drives and partitions) and then launch from ram, possibly getting around all of the issues? Again, just some thoughts which I am "throwing out there" for the experts here.
