System hangs on POST when drive plugged into SATA card

[neve]

I'm trying to get a SATA card based on the Silicone Image Si3114 chip to work. I can boot fine (into Debian Wheezy) when there are no drives plugged in, but plug a drive in and I don't get past the SATA card's BIOS in POST. I've tried a new SanDisk SSD, an old 80GB Hitachi laptop drive and an even older 80 GB Baracuda, all with the same effect.

I've tried the following BIOS versions: b5500, r5403, r5314 and whatever was on there to begin with. The card has two DIPs for "Module SLOT select".
There's a table which lists the effects these DIPs have on things like REQ#, GNT#, CLK, IDSEL and INT#, but I'm not sure what to do with these. This is the only device on the PCI bus.

As an added complication, this is all in the PC/104+ industrial form factor and this is the only SATA card I can find, so I can't go buy another brand. The brand I used previously is no longer available.

 

[popatim]

If you are trying to use a raid card just to use a sata drive there are other choices such as a sata-ide bridge which you plug into the sata drive and then the motherbds ide cable plugs into it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119257

Which make and model card is this?
What are you trying to accomplish?

 

[neve]

The SATA card is a Advantech PCM-3621
Our atom based "motherboard" is an Advanced Digital Logic ADLS15PC which has a built in 4GB drive but no SATA controller.
We're logging data via PostgreSQL on Debian and want a second storage device.

We don't need much storage, so the first thing I tried was a good 4GB CF card on the IDE bus (with an adapter).
It was very slow and caused system wide problems. This could be because the IDE bus also has 10 serial ports as well as a digital/analog IO card. It's been a few years so I don't recall the specifics of the problem, but using a SATA SSD solved them. I'll look in to the device you suggested.

If you are trying to use a raid card just to use a sata drive there are other choices such as a sata-ide bridge which you plug into the sata drive and then the motherbds ide cable plugs into it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119257

Which make and model card is this?
What are you trying to accomplish?

 

[neve]

I've made progress. I tried all the DIP switch combinations, and one worked (sort of)! When the system booted, it reported the attached old 80GB drive. Once booted into linux, I could see it when I did fdisk -l.
I then tried rebooting with the new SSD attached. It reported the drive in post, but once Debian booted, I couldn't see it. I rebooted and was able to go into the SATA card's BIOS where it gave me choices of setting the drive up as RAID 0,1,10, spare, ... I don' think I wanted any of these, so I loaded a non raid firmware.
I then booted again. The drive was reported in POST, but nothing in the OS. I wonder if this SATA card is having trouble with a SATA 3 drive?