Silicon Image PATA RAID doesn't work

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dewey
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Joined: Sat Mar 15, 2003 2:52 am

Silicon Image PATA RAID doesn't work

Post by dewey »

Hi,

I just installed a Skymaster (cheapish) sil0680A PATA RAID pci card and its not showing the RAID BIOS when I boot my machine. I've tried it in other motherboards (asus a7v133) and confirmed that the card works.

Following specs on the bp6:
2 x 400mhz celerons (66mhz FSB)
640Mb non-ecc RAM (256 + 256 + 128)
nVidia Geforce 2 MX400

I've flashed with the RV BIOS (both hp and non-hp versions) and swapped the card through each PCI slot. The IRQ assignments don't show anything to indicate the card is recieving an IRQ.

I've got the boot order set to: EXT, C, A (EXT = SCSI) although I don't think it should matter. One other thing I'm confused about is that even though I've tried the RV bios with no HP366 drivers, the Blue (ctrl-H) screen still loads, is it meant to or is my flashing not working?

Any ideas for BIOS tweaks would be great!

thanks again,

Dwight.
InactiveX
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Post by InactiveX »

Hi there dewey!

I don't know why your IDE card isn't working, but the RV BIOS without HPT should show no blue screen. I use that BIOS and all trace of the HPT is absent when I start my BP6.

Like you suspect, your flashing is not working.
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dewey
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Post by dewey »

Ok thanks for confirming that there must be an issue with the BIOS Flash.

I'm using the award flasher from the files section of this site and on POST it says 'RV' in the bottom left of the screen to indicate its an RV bios. I'll focus on getting rid of the HPT bluescreen and then go from there.

Thanks,

dewey
Derek
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Post by Derek »

What procedure are you following to flash the BIOS?
-Derek
dewey
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Post by dewey »

Update: I've correctly flashed to RV (no hpt) and it doesn't display the HPT blue screen.

I've tried with a single CPU and single stick of RAM and even a PCI video card. The RAID card isn't being assigned an IRQ and isn't even shown in the device listing when the PC boots.

Can anybody think of any motherboard jumpers or BIOS settings that might do the trick?

dewey
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Post by InactiveX »

Seeing as it isn't even being detected after the POST, and that it works with other motherboards, I think you may have to put this card down as one of those things that just doesn't want to agree with the BP6 (as frustrating as that is).

Perhaps you could exchange it for a Promise card? Many people use them successfully, myself included, although mine is not a RAID card.

One thing you could try is to plug in a different set of hard disks. If that doesn't work, I can't think of anything else at this moment.
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dewey
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Post by dewey »

Hi,

Thats what I've decided too. Which is annoying but it happens I spose....

Not real happy cause this SI card cause me AU$55 and the promise ones are all around the AU$180 mark which is a big difference.

Unless there is a BIOS tweak then I'm goin to have to go for the promise.

dewey
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Post by InactiveX »

You may be interested to know about this hack.

With a little simple soldering and a BIOS flash, you can turn a cheap Promise Ultra66 into a FastTrack RAID card!

I believe there are similar procedures for the faster Ultra cards too.

I did it on my Ultra66 and it really does work. And hacking stuff is always fun. 8)
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Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

there is a jumper on the board (0685) that mentions mboard fsb
is it set to 66mhz ?
dewey
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Post by dewey »

Hi,

Well yesterday I said 'fark it' and went out and picked up an Adaptec 1200A. Its a highpoint chipped card. I was really looking for a promise card but they had this thing in stock and it was a bit cheaper than the Promise so I decided to give it ago.

I plugged it in and nearly cried when it didn't display the card bios but I did see that it had been assigned an IRQ (unlike the silicon image card) so I was a little more optimistic.

After rebooting and entering the BIOS and loading "setup defaults" in the BIOS, the card displayed its own BIOS. Stoked. I then decided to go back into the BIOS and reconfigure the usual tweaks as well as trying to identify what particular setting was causing the Bp6 to not display the card bios. It turns out that it is the setting "Init First Display" : PCI/AGP. If I have it set to AGP (i have an AGP card), then the RAID BIOS doesn't work.

Bizarre but I'm happy. I've got the RAID array configured and its onward to setting up a nice Samba file server for me and the family.

Thanks for the ideas and support gentlemen,

dewey.
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Post by purrkur »

Thanks for sharing the solution with us Dewey!
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