SiI 3112 PCI & MSI-6167; boot problems

MahoneyMahoney
edited June 2005 in Hardware
Hi,

I hope this is sufficient of an emergency... I posted this in a different forum but it doesn't seem to be getting many views. Apologies if I've broken etiquette.

I have an old 6167 MSI Motherboard, and I have recently upgraded to add
the SiL 3112 SATA Controller PCI Card in order to use a 200GB SATA
Drive. I have the latest version of the motherboard BIOS (1.6) which is built on Award 6.00, and the 3112 is running 4.2.50 which seems to be the latest version of its BIOS.

I am trying to boot to my old IDE hard drive, with the SATA drive as an
extra drive. I have the IDE hard drive as primary master and my DVD/CD
drive as secondary master. I have the BIOS set to boot to floppy
first, then HDD-0, then nothing - all other options (including SCSI)
disabled.

The computer now hangs on boot, just after "Verifying DMI Pool Data";
if I set it up to boot from CD first & there's no valid CD in the CD
drive it reports:

Verifying DMI Pool Data...
Unable to boot from CD-ROM

and then hangs, which suggests to me it's not the actual act of
Verifying DMI Pool Data that's the issue, but working out how to boot.

If I unplug the SATA HDD from the PCI card (but leave the PCI card
installed) it boots fine into Windows XP. What's more, I can then hot
plug the SATA drive into the SATA Controller and use it absolutely
fine.

I've tried all sorts of different boot orders but it doesn't seem to
make any difference; each time I have to unplug the SATA drive from the
SATA card to boot up then hotplug it in when XP is up and running (the
controller card does support this!).

I've also tried various cominations of IDE Primary/Secondary Slave & Master for the IDE drives, including unplugging both of them - behaviour remains the same.

This place seems to be very knowledgeable on these SiI cards; anyone got any bright ideas? It's a bit of a pain...

Comments

  • MahoneyMahoney
    edited June 2005
    Any ideas at all? Is it worth asking in the Storage and Controllers forum, or do basically the same people browse that as here?

    Thanks
  • PirateNinjaPirateNinja Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    So the hard drive shows up in Windows after a hot plug? Sounds scary. What filesystem is on the hard drive?

    It would seem to me it is trying to boot off of the 200gb and it probably doesnt have an os on it. I realize this is contrary to your BIOS, but perhaps it wold be good to snoop around in the 3112's bios and make sure everything there is correct.
  • MahoneyMahoney
    edited June 2005
    Gravite2090 wrote:
    So the hard drive shows up in Windows after a hot plug? Sounds scary. What filesystem is on the hard drive?

    It's meant to - it's a documented feature of the SATA Controller card. Using 64K NTFS filesystem.
    It would seem to me it is trying to boot off of the 200gb and it probably doesnt have an os on it. I realize this is contrary to your BIOS, but perhaps it wold be good to snoop around in the 3112's bios and make sure everything there is correct.

    Yes, I think that is what's going on. I can't work out how to get in to the 3112's BIOS - should I be able to get in on boot?
  • PirateNinjaPirateNinja Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    Ya you should be able to get in the bios, I have that same chip built in my nf7s but i dont use sata so its disabled. But if I remember correctly the button you want to hit is F4, so I guesss randomly hitting F4 on boot couldnt hurt. Can anyone confirm thats the right key?
  • MahoneyMahoney
    edited June 2005
    Cool, I'll give that a go when I get home.
  • GobblesGobbles Ventura California
    edited June 2005
    do you have another sata drive you can try it with. From briefly skimming this it sounds like a hard drive that is DOA. Ive had ide drives fail and give that behavior.

    HOWEVER.

    an improperly jumpered drive can cause problems. What drive is it and does the sata drive have a jumper block? My 80g maxtors do.
  • MahoneyMahoney
    edited June 2005
    There was nothing wrong with either hard drive. I bought a new BIOS from a bunch called eSupport, who it seems do provide new BIOSes for motherboards that are no longer supported by the manufacturer (I already had the latest version of the manufacturer's BIOS) and it cured it.

    Never did manage to get into the PCI card's BIOS, but doesn't matter now!

    Thanks for the help.
Sign In or Register to comment.