Silicon Image 3114 card woes

[Skinleech]

Grrr, just typed a big long post then I got a page cannot displayed error. Went back and my whole post was gone

So, concise version.

My mobo has 4 SATA ports. I'm going to have 6 SATA devices in the machine (it's a HTPC so needs loads of storage) so I need a SATA card. Tried a VIA chipset card which didn't work (http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.p...ghlight=vt6421) and now have an SI 3114 card.

The PC POSTs fine & the SI card BIOS comes up and detects the connected HDD (or the BD-rom I tried). But then it hangs, giving me a flashing cursor, and I can get no further. If I unplug the drive thats connected to the card XP boots fine & it found the card & installed the drivers. I also got updated drivers from MS Update.

I wondered about flashing the BIOS & got the necessary files from the SI site. But it states you need to be in Windows, run their RAID tool & have a SATA drive connected to the card in order to upgrade, which is no use as I can't get into Windows!

Any ideas anyone? I'm getting well peed off here as it makes my new BD-Rom pretty much useless, and I don't want to go down the route of buying a new motherboard with 6 SATA ports.

Oh, I'm running an MSI socket 939 Nforce board by the way. Think it's NF3, but not 100% sure. It has an on board 6150 DVI out card if that helps.

Thank you!

[nichomach]

Sounds as though you need to check the boot order in the BIOS; seems as though it's trying to boot off the drive attached to the 3114, so you'll need to tell it to boot from the onboard controller.

[Skinleech]

That's not the issue, but thanks. The Boot order is fine in the BIOS, nothing has changed. If it was, surely I'd get the "Non system disk or disk error" stryle message anyway.

[Skinleech]

A thought. The HDD could be SATA300 whereas the card is SATA150, so I may need to flip the jumper, correct?

If that's the case though why would the BD-Rom hang? I'm not sure if it's SATA300 or not, but I guess the SI card may not like Rom drives attached to it.

[nichomach]

That's not the issue, but thanks. The Boot order is fine in the BIOS, nothing has changed. If it was, surely I'd get the "Non system disk or disk error" stryle message anyway.

Not necessarily, and if the boot order was set to try an add-in card first where one was initially not present, and then one was added, that would produce the symptoms you describe, as would the boot order setting the new hard drive that you connected first automatically. The system would have looked for an add-in card, realised that there wasn't one and then booted off the diak connected to the onboard controller.

[Skinleech]

Not necessarily, and if the boot order was set to try an add-in card first where one was initially not present, and then one was added, that would produce the symptoms you describe, as would the boot order setting the new hard drive that you connected first automatically. The system would have looked for an add-in card, realised that there wasn't one and then booted off the diak connected to the onboard controller.

Fair enough, thanks for the info. Like I say though, that's not the issue. The boot order is, and has always been set to the onboard motherboard SATA controller, except during Windows install, when I was booting from a USB HD-DVD drive.

Cheers.

[Sema4]

I use an Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce 4 motherboard, and in addition to the 4 nForce SATA connectors, it also has a SIL3114 chip built in to handle another set of 4 SATA ports.

In this case, the nForce SATA and the SIL SATA get along just fine so I assume it's not an incompatibility.

With my built in SIL3114 chip, I can hot swap drives on to the SIL controller while the computer is running, XP just makes the usual 'da-dum' 'new hard ware found' type sound you normally get when you plug a USB device in, then a few seconds later, the drive appears in the 'my computer' window.

According to the specification for your card on the Silicon Image website, the card you have is 'hot-plug capable', see http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=28

Have you tried booting in to windows and then hot plugging a drive in to the card ?

[Skinleech]

Have you tried booting in to windows and then hot plugging a drive in to the
card ?

I've not thanks, will do so tonight though.

Cheers

[Skinleech]

Ok, so I booted into XP and noted the BIOS revision of the SI card when doing so. It's already the latest BIOS version which I a scunner. Or so I thought.

I hot plugged the HDD in anyway, it sprang to life easily, which was nice. I then rebooted and the PC went into XP! The SI card found the drive, gave me the flashing cursor but only for a few seconds, rather than several minutes. I get a black screen for a few seconds after the cursor, so XP is certainly taking it's time to load, but load it does. I also tried shutting down and switching on - still worked.

So thanks for your help!