Updated Gigabyte x99-ud4 BIOS now system wont boot with Areca RAID card installed

[peeteemac]

MB Bios update - now PC wont boot with areca 1260 plugged in
I flashed my Gigabyte x99-ud4 motherboard bios a couple of days ago and since then my system wont boot with the Areca 1260 plugged in. It wont display any output to monitor and is non responsive to any keystroke.

Ive tried:
Rolling back to the origonal BIOS (F6)
Upgrading to the latest BIOS (F12)
And everything in between (F6-12)
Clearing the CMOS
Tried swapping the raid card to the first PCI-e slot (in case it had issues on a x4 slot)
Removed the BBU
Im looking for another stick of RAM to test with and another system but am starting to get desperate (16tb offline until I can fix this)

Any help would be much appreciated

System
Gigabyte x99-ud4 rev1 (Current BIOS F11)
WIn 8.1pro (installed on revo 256gb pci ssd)
areca 1260 6x4tb in RAID6

Im wondering if it may be caused by the OPRom settings (legacy vs UEFI)

 

[i7Baby]

So - its fine without the areca card in? Can you do your raid in bios instead?

 

[peeteemac]

Yes - system boots fine without raid card.

Cant load the drives outside of the raid card (dont want to risk anything happening to the data going from hardware raid to software raid)

 

[i7Baby]

If the card doesn't work with new or old bios and the PC works fine without the card then there's something wrong with the card. RMA it.

 

[peeteemac]

I'll take it into work with me tomorrow to test on another system but it just seems like too much of a coincidence that it "failed" at exactly the same time as the BIOS update. Im hoping that after setting the BIOS back to optimized defaults as part of the flashing process I have simply misconfigured a setting causing it to fail the initialization.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

[i7Baby]

I have a feeling that the bios update got rid of the raid set up in bios. And that's all that's happened. Same would happen if you reset back to defaults.

 

[peeteemac]

any idea how to resolve if I cant boot with the card installed?

 

[i7Baby]

I'm looking around eg https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Reconstruction

Also professional data recovery ads everywhere. Maybe we can get help from Tom's Mods. I'll PM Blackbird. He might know an expert.

 

[peeteemac]

The card works fine on another system.
Tried clearing the CMOS again but no joy. Also setting the PCI Bus speed from auto to Gen1

Both - no dice.