onboard sata conflict with sata PCI adapter

[alangsam]

.<b> Has anyone had any success in running another raid card along with the embedded card in their windows XP based system?
I have an A7N8X Deluxe Mobo with integrated Silicon image Raid Controller with two sata drives as my boot volume.
I have purchased a second PCI based SATA controller card from LSI - Megaraid 150. I have had nothing but trouble and finger pointing from LSI and ASUS. The only way I can get the system to boot is to disconnect the drives attached to the PCI SATA controller. whats interesting is that both the embedded card and the PCI card configure in the bootup but when the PCI cards drives are connected it wont let the system see the embeeded drives. Turns out this PCI card has same silicon image raid controller chip?

 

[george_jetson]

I've got the a7n8x deluxe as do you. I've got a Promise TX4 SATA controller that works fine with the motherboard controller. Currently I've got 3 hard drives working from the Promise card and 1 working from the motherboard. Originally I was booting from the motherboard controller with 1, then 2 hard drives, but then the machine wouldn't boot when I installed the Promise controller and hooked up a 3rd hard drive.

I tried different things and finally found that the boot drive wanted to be on the Promise controller. I didn't change anything in BIOS, on the motherboard, the Promise controller, or any of the hard drives to the best of my knowledge, altho when I start trying to make things work I don't always keep track of every detail. But I digress .. All I really did was put the boot drive on the Promise controller, port1. I don't even know if the port of the Promise matters at all.

I guess I would've thought that the boot hard drive would want to remain on the motherboard controller, but that isn't true, in my experience. The boot hard drive was formatted and loaded on the motherboard controller, by the way. I may add another Promise SATA controller, or use on the motherboard IDE controller for yet more hard drive additions, so that should make for more fun. Or hopefully, all will work happily from this point on.

 

[sjonnie]

Running multiple RAID adapters can present problems. For example, Promise controllers are not compatible with one another. However, I am using 3 different Highpoint controllers in the same system. Which PCI slot the cards are in can affect the boot up - try using different slots and see what happens.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A> 😎

 

[wmunn]

I have had success running multiple raid controllers based on the Silicon image chipsets. I Have heard that promise raid while excellent in performance, doesn't cooperate with other raid controllers, even other promise cards...

 

[arkus]

I'm running a Highpoint 1640 4 channel SATA RAID PCI card without any problems on a Abit IS7-G mobo, which has a built-in Silicon Image RAID controller in use (2 drives on each controller).

Once I'd set the BIOS correctly it worked fine.

PIV2.6|IS7-G|1GbDDR266|R9700Pro|SonicFury5.1|4*36GbRaptor
2*120GbCaviar|Highpoint1640|CRW-F1|GC7000|460w EG465AX-VE(G)
ATC210cAX-1|1451Visionmaster|AltecLansing5100|WinXPSP1|DX9.0b

 

[jim552]

The current Promise SATA controllers, RAID and otherwise, are NOT designed to work with multiple instances of the same controller card in a system. (A HUGE dissapointment for me as I was switching out SX-6000 controllers where you can have up to 4 instances of the same controller in a system.)

If your Promise SATA cards are substantially different enough where a Promise driver will not recognize the other Promise card you are okay. Whenever a Promise RAID controller sees more than one Promise card it THINKS it is the driver for it will not work. (At least that has been my experience.)

Case in point on Asus motherboards where you have the on board SATA controller enabled you can use a Fastrak S150 TX4 controller without problems, but a if you try to use just the S150 TX4 it doesn't usually work. Also Fastrak S150 TX4 drivers will recognize regulard S150 TX4 controllers but will not work. (There are a whole bunch of possibilities for defining resources by PCI slot and order of driver installation, and sometimes you can get around it. Maybe even all of the time with effort. Promise Tech-support says that they DO NOT support this configuration though so I don't use it. I just played around with it because I was hoping to use it.

Also many SATA controllers have an option where you can enable or disable the BIOS. You will need to have the BIOS enabled on ONLY one SATA controller, and disabled on the others. This will avoid a bunch of problems as well. (NOTE: You need to have the BIOS enabled on the BOOT controller.)

I have also had problems where I installed the wrong drive, it was an S150 TX4 driver instead of a Fastrak S150 TX4 driver. Both of the drivers can see the same card, but there are problems if it's the wrong driver for the card. In that case, it was a BEAR digging the driver out of the OS. Just uninstalling did not remove all references to it, so I had to go to the INF files and remove those, so I could install the proper driver. (Yeah, it's a problem on the part of Promise! They shouldn't have drivers that would recognize a Promise controller card that they are NOT designed to control.)

I have not been a fan of LSI for about 8 years. (They used to be great!)

Lately I've pretty much been a Promise person! I like the PAM tool for monitoring systems, I like that their controllers don't to any special formatting of the drives if you just mirror them, they are pretty fast, and pretty reliable.

Likely your best bet is to just get a controller that will handle all of the SATA drives that you need.

If you are REAL lucky it may just be the BIOS setting! Or maybe the BOOT order of the SCSI controllers if that motherboard supports that? (Recognizing the controller in BIOS is the best hope though!)

Supposedly Promise will have a six channel controller out soon, but there is no specific time frame.

I hope that helps a bit?
Good Luck.