booting halts due to new disks being connected

synthnassizer

Commendable
Oct 15, 2016
2
0
1,510
I have a Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard with the latest BIOS flashed in (version F13).

I also have 4x sata disks (in proven working condition) from a different server. Two of them are Western Digital `ATA WDC WD1003FBYZ-0` and the other 2 the (very similar) `ATA WDC WD1003FBYX-0`.

To connect the disks I used 2x ASMedia ASM1061 PCIe-1x to SATA sata controllers (firm.ver. 3.80), since I have already used up all of my motherboard's SATA and PATA ports on other hard disks.

The problem is that once I connect the disks onto the sata controllers, the boot process stops sometime before `lilo` (I am running slackware linux) boot loader menu is loaded. In fact the boot process gets stuck in the following screen:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/bvRuO.jpg

If I remove the disks, but keep the controllers connected onto the motherboard, the boot will continue normally. Then once booted I can "hot plug" the disks and they will show up fine in the system (using `dmesg` to verify). I have used `cfdisk` to overwrite the "MBR" of each disk and to make sure that the bootable flag is not set.

I have also double checked whether the BIOS uses as the first boot device the disk I actually want (which is not part of these 4 disks) and indeed I can verify that this is the case. Here you can see that the BIOS has identified the following boot devices (disks and pci cards):

https://i.stack.imgur.com/cP2pM.jpg

You can see here most of the disks that are directly attached to the motherboard's SATA ports - so none of the 4 disks that create the problem. You can also see that the last option #8 "Bootable add in cards" refers to the sata controller cards. So on top there is the preferred boot device and down at the bottom there is the sata controller cards, but somehow during boot the process will stop.

So I am out of ideas about what could be causing the boot process to halt.
I have not been able to find info about how to log on the sata controller's boot configuration menu (if any exists): no informative message about a key combination that would allow that appears, nor I have found any relevant info on the internet. Is it possible that this sata controller model does not have a boot configuration screen?

EDIT:
Thinking out loud, I wonder if the normal procedure when you try to boot a non bootable disk would throw a "boot failure" message. Since this does not happen here maybe this is not at all a problem with the extra disks trying to be booted from, but something different altogether (no clue as to what though).

 

synthnassizer

Commendable
Oct 15, 2016
2
0
1,510


Hi Calvin7, thank you for your answer.
I can assure you the card works fine under Linux (as I describe in the Q, I can hot plug the drives once boot in Linux is complete).
What you refer to is that the manufacturer of the controller does not officially support the GNU/Linux operating system.

Regardless, the problem I describe is related to BIOS and has nothing to do with Linux or Windows.