SATA controller cards not working together

sarmitage

Hi everyone,

I have a quite old ABIT NF7-S v2.0 motherboard which has an onboard Sil3112A SATA controller offering two ports. Some years ago I purchased a Promise SATA150 TX2 Plus, which has two more SATA ports (as well as a PATA port). This setup has been working fine for > 4 years.

A few weeks ago I acquired some new SATA hard drives, and I need one more SATA port for my desired setup. So I purchased another PCI card, this one running the Sil3512 controller, offering yet two more ports for a total of six.

The problem is that whenever I have <i>both</i> PCI cards installed in my system, none of my SATA ports recognize the hard drives connected to them (sometimes they don't show up at all, sometimes they show up as 0GB). When either one of the PCI cards is installed, all SATA ports work fine.

Please help!

-Scott

kryyst

Sounds like the drivers are conflicting and that it's not understanding that you have two different cards installed, but that's just a guess.

sarmitage

I definitely think that it is a conflict of some sort, but I don't think it is the drivers.. I mean that the cards don't detect the drives during the boot process (i.e. when they are running their boot ROM from the BIOS). Also, running `lspci -nn` returns all three controllers.

kryyst

Hmmm wonder if it's a restriction in the bios. Normally at boot you can access a pci sata card to configure things. Could be with two installed they just conflict entirely on a residential PC.