Question SATA Card Disables Motherboard SATA Ports

[herbray]

I have a PCI-Express two-port SATA card (from SSU).
It is model SU-SATA3-T2.

The card seems to work, but with one big problem: it disables the four motherboard SATA ports.

The mother board has four SATA ports that are taken up by four hard drives that are in two RAID1 arrays. I'd like to connect the DVD drive, and that's why I bought the two-port card. Unfortunately, the card seems to want to be the only SATA interface.

Does anyone know how to get around this?

Thanks.

 

[ThatVietGuy]

What is your motherboard's make and model?

 

[herbray]

It's a Dell Optiplex 990.
It looks like the Dell motherboard part number is 06D7TR.

 

[herbray]

To add more color, the SATA card's BIOS is coming into the stack in place of the internal RAID controller BIOS.

Simply installing the card doesn't cause a problem. On boot-up, first I see the card's BIOS. Since I haven't connected any devices to it, it correctly reports, "Can't find any devices." I suspect that it then kills itself, making way for the internal RAID controller BIOS. I then see the usual display of RAID arrays and their respective component drives.

If I connect my DVD drive to the SATA card then, on boot-up, I see the report from the SATA card BIOS, but nothing from the internal RAID controller. Then, I get "No boot device found".

On checking the system BIOS, I see that the system sees the individual hardware drives, but not the RAID virtual drives; hence, not boot device.

I checked for address collisions, I/O, and IRQ conflicts: nothing.

Any ideas out there?