First post, by stanwebber
this is a new build to replace a biostar m7mia-r that recently died for unknown reasons. i sourced an iwill kk266r-plus as the most direct replacement i could find. both have an hpt37x raid controller onboard so i could just drop in my existing striped array with no reconfiguration. here's my problem:
when 'usb keyboard under dos' is enabled in the bios the hpt37x refuses to boot (or display the setup prompt). at the end of post i just get a no system disk message; press any key to retry. disabling dos keyboard support allows a normal raid boot, but then i'm locked out of my boot menu and forced into the default os selection.
all 5 of my PCs have the same customizable mechanical usb keyboard so i'm loathe to switch back to ps2 (plus the cost wouldn't be cheap for something comparable).
when i boot off a live linux cd with dos support enabled the raid array is perfectly accessible as if nothing was wrong. i've tried everything i could think of and am running out of ideas:
- usb & raid share an irq so i tried manually moving the raid controller around to different IRQs
- switched up the boot order to every combination of cdrom, raid100, hdd-0 and disabled possible
- toggled 'boot other device' on & off
- disabled 1 or both onboard ide channels
- disabled every extraneous integrated peripheral, except for usb
- reset configuration data
the last thing i can think of is modding the bios to update the hpt37x firmware to the last released ver. i did this with the m7mia-r board over a decade ago and may still have the modding software if i look hard enough, but a cursory search for instructions hasn't aged well after all this time.
really, all i need is to be able to navigate a boot menu & have a keyboard in dos 7.1 so if there's a purely software solution out there i'm fine with that. i currently use ntldr & plop as my boot managers.
does anyone have any ideas or a workaround i haven't thought of? thanks.
