ATTO ExpressPCI FC Using the Selectable Boot option ----- --- ---------- ---- ------ NOTE - The selectable boot option only works on systems that do not have a Plug-n-Play system BIOS. In a system with a Plug-n-Play system BIOS, the boot drive selection in the BIOS setup is supposed to perform this function. Using the Selectable Boot option, you can override the default hard disk drive assignment order. To use the option, press [Ctrl] [F] when the prompt to do so appears while booting your system. The Adapter setup program will be executed. Select "2. Selectable Boot Device" from the main menu. Changing the "Enable Selectable Boot" field to "Yes" will bring up a list of candidate disk drives. Select the desired drive and press Enter. NOTE - once a drive has been selected using the Selectable Boot feature, to change the selected drive, you must change the "Enable Selectable Boot" field to "No" then back to "Yes," again bringing up the drive selection list. ATTO ExpressPCI FC uses the unique world-wide Node Name of the Selectable Boot drive during system initialization to find the drive. Therefore, if the drive's Fibre Channel Loop ID changes during a later system startup, the proper drive will be used as the boot device. The system BIOS numbers hard disks at hex 80 and above. Due to historical considerations, Drive 80h must be the system boot device. The order in which drive numbers get assigned to hard disks depends on the order in which the adapters' expansion ROM BIOS's are initialized by the system BIOS. For adapters which control disk drives, the system BIOS first initializes any IDE adapters, then SCSI adapters. This order is fixed by the system BIOS. To make matters worse, some system BIOS's scan the PCI bus backwards, finding adapters in higher numbered PCI Device ID's first. Once drive numbers are established (after all expansion ROM BIOS's have been initialized), most operating systems will assign drive letters in the following order: 1. All primary partitions are assigned drive letters, beginning with A: and at drive number 80h. For example, if there are primary partitions on drives 80h and 82h but none on 81h, the primary partition on drive 80h will be C: and the one on 82h will be D:. 2. All secondary partitions are assigned drive letters, beginning with the next available drive letter and with drive 80h. For example, assume that 80h has one primary and one secondary partition, 81h has a primary and two secondaries, and 82h has a primary and a single secondary. The drive letter assignments will be as follows: C: Primary partition on drive 80h D: Primary partition on drive 81h E: Primary partition on drive 82h F: Secondary partition on drive 80h G: First secondary partition on drive 81h H: Second secondary partition on drive 81h I: Secondary partition on drive 82h How Selectable Boot works --- ---------- ---- ----- Let's say you have a system with one internal IDE hard disk, a standard SCSI adapter with two drives, and an ATTO ExpressPCI FC adapter with four drives attached. The IDE drive will always be initialized by the system BIOS first and, in absense of the Selectable Boot option, would be assigned drive number 80h. Let's also assume that on your computer, the SCSI adapter will be initialized before the ExpressPCI-FC adapter. The SCSI drives would then be assigned drive numbers 81h and 82h. The four drives on the ExpressPCI-FC adapter would then be 82h, 83h, 84h, and 85h. Now let's select the third drive on the ExpressPCI-FC adapter, which would bave been drive 84h, as the Selectable Boot drive. The Expansion ROM BIOS on the ExpressPCI-FC card will "steal" any requests for drive 80h and route them to what used to be drive 84h. Any requests for drives 81h through 84h will now be routed to what used to be drives 80h through 83h. What has happened is that all the drives which had drive numbers 80h through 83h have had their drive numbers incremented and the Selectable Boot drive becomes drive 80h. Since most people think in terms of drive letters, assume that each of the drives above had only a primary partition on them. The assigned drive letters, in the absense of Selectable Boot, would have been C: through I:. When drive 84h is selected, the drive that used to be H: is now C: and all the drives from C: through G: have had their drive letters changed to D: through H: respecively. The system will now boot off of what used to be drive H:, and that drive will be called C: by the operating system. Note that an operating system must have been installed on the drive; if none is installed, you will receive a message such as "Missing operating system" when booting the system. Special notes for Windows NT ------- ----- --- ------- -- Unlike other operating systems, in the order in which it loads the drivers. The IDE driver is always loaded first, so drive letters are always assigned to IDE drives first; therefore, if you have a primary partition on the internal IDE disk drive, it will be assigned drive letter C:, even in the presence of the selectable boot option. When installing NT on a system with the Selectable Boot option enabled and with IDE drives present, NT will be confused about the size of the IDE disk drive. This is because NT assumes that the IDE drive will always be drive 80h and therefore gets the size of the drive using an INT 13h call for drive 80h. It then may show the size of the Selectable Boot drive with the IDE drive, or if the Selectable Boot drive is larger than 8033 mb, it may show a size of 8033 mb. To avoid this situation during install, disable the internal IDE controller during NT install in the presence of Selectable Boot.Download Driver Pack
After your driver has been downloaded, follow these simple steps to install it.
Expand the archive file (if the download file is in zip or rar format).
If the expanded file has an .exe extension, double click it and follow the installation instructions.
Otherwise, open Device Manager by right-clicking the Start menu and selecting Device Manager.
Find the device and model you want to update in the device list.
Double-click on it to open the Properties dialog box.
From the Properties dialog box, select the Driver tab.
Click the Update Driver button, then follow the instructions.
Very important: You must reboot your system to ensure that any driver updates have taken effect.
For more help, visit our Driver Support section for step-by-step videos on how to install drivers for every file type.