Server won't start with Sil3114 connected to a hard drive

Hi all

Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

I have an unRAID server and all was working well until I connected a Seagate 750 GB SATAII drive to the generic Sil3114 PCI card I had in a slot (with no drives connected to it since I built the server last month).

The drive is a SATAII, but it still has the jumper on it to work in SATA I mode.

The server POSTs and then gets stuck at the card's screen where it tells me to press ctrl-S or F4 to enter the setup menu. However, at this point pressing any keys gives a system beep and there's no response.

I cannot enter this menu to try and set things up when there are no drives connected; it just says no devices found and continues to boot.

All this happens before the UNRAID USB key can even load up. At first I thought it was stopped because adding the new drive caused the system to try and boot from this drive. I thought a simple entry into the BIOS to reaffirm that I wanted to boot from USB, despite the addition, would get me somewhere....

It will NOT even let me enter the BIOS when the drive is connected as the BIOS come after this screen on my motherboard.

Mobo is an eVGA 7100.

Well, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but I'd say either your SATA controller is defective or it is incompatible with your drive.  Is it so generic that you cannot get tech support for it?

SirWired

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I doubt I can get tech support, but I might be able to return the card. Another option is to install it into a Windows machine and flash the card's BIOS to whatever the latest is and then put it back into the unRAID server and try again. I'll be attempting this at the weekend. Since this card is on the listed compatible PCI boards, I just wondered whether anyone had specific experience with this problem.

I just bought and hooked up one of these today and it is working so far.  SIL3114 three drives hooked up to it.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=CL-SL3114&cat=CCD

I just bought and hooked up one of these today and it is working so far.  SIL3114 three drives hooked up to it.

 

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=CL-SL3114&cat=CCD

Thanks! I got the same card from the same place. Hmmmm, I wonder if it's busted somehow.

More info for you unRAID/PC/Linux gurus:

Everything is fine if I connect a 120 GB SATA (I) drive. It starts up and all is well.

If I connect my Seagate 750 GB SATA (II) drive (with SATA I jumper in position), or my WD 750 GB SATA (II) drive, I get the boot up problems described above. So I'm thinking that perhaps jumper or not, the card will only work with pure SATA (I) drives, OR... there's a drive capacity limit at something below 750 GB. I installed the card in my desktop Windows machine, but I couldn't find a way to flash the BIOS on the card while it was in there.

my drives are all under 500 if that helps.

my drives are all under 500 if that helps.

Thanks a lot for mentioning that; I was going to ask you for this info, either by PM or here. I'll throw in a 500 GB drive and see if it works. I already have three 750 GB drives marked for the server, so if it's a capacity issue, I'll have to use a different card. If I figure it out, I'll let you know too; I'm sure you'd like to be aware in case you ever want to upgrade to higher capacity drives. I think I'll get a Promise TX4 4 port SATA II controller instead, and sell the SIL if it can't be upgraded via BIOS.

I almost got the promise OEM card from newegg. The $16 was hard to pass up but if it doesn't work oh well.  I'll follow this post to see if you get it figured out.  I would try a bigger drive I just do not have one right now.

I think this card is not compatible with 4.2.1 I am getting all kinds of parity errors when running a check.  I also tried to backup my Dell laptop with acronis true image 11 and the image validation fails.  If I write it to a IDE drive on the server the image passes.

I downgraded to 4.0 and it appears to pass the validation for acronis.  I am doing a parity check now.  Again this is the SIL3114 from geeks.com

I did some digging and found others with problems with larger disks than 500 GB. It's either a firmware issue with the card or the drives in my case. I've downloaded updates and flashing utilities for the card. Now I just have to get my DOS booting USB key sorted out. At the same time, i managed to find someone selling a Promise TX4 for $60 shipped, so that'll be arriving tomorrow. I'll definitely move to the Promise controller, and then see what I can salvage from the $17 Geeks card.

I updated the card's BIOS to b5403.bin and have a parity check running.  No errors so far.  The last parity check had 129,XXX sync errors.

Cool! That's what I intend to do too. Did you put it into a Windows machine, or use the DOS utility for flashing?

USB floppy. I hope this works.

I'll be trying from another USB key first, and if that fails, I'll put it into my XP machine. Good luck- I hope your upgrde fixed everything. In my case, I got the Promise TX4 anyway, so I'll use it for now. If Lime Tech gets my mobo's built in gig ethernet NIC working in unRAID 4.3, I'll have a spare PCI slot to use the SIL for additional drives in the future..

Well, when first started the parity test passed with 0 errors.  I copied a few files and ran a parity check and the sync errors are happening again over 1000 errors in a few minutes so I canceled the parity check.  I have a theory that mixing IDE and SATA drives in this setup is what is causing the problems.  I am copying all the files from the IDE drives to the SATA drives.  I will then remove the IDE drives and run a parity check. 

I have narrowed it down to a bad parity drive.  I tried a few other configurations and they were not getting the check parity sync errors.  I fomatted the parity drive that was getting the errors in windows and took out a jumper in the back of the drive that was limiting its operation to 1.5gps.  If I still get the parity check errors I will just RMA the Drive.

Is the parity drive connected to the mobo SATA ports, or the SIL's? If the latter, you're asking for trouble by removing the jumpers, since the SIL card is only SATA (I).

Sata 1 jumper limit should not cause any errors.

One more thing to consider, some weeks ago I was having corruption problems copying files to my server, I’m using a user share with 14 disks and it only happened sometimes, after some troubleshooting I finally isolated the problem to when I copied files to the drives connect to a Sil3112 controller, the controller was bad. If I had the parity drive on this controller I would get errors every time I run parity check. You can easily check this by copying some files (I used a 10gb dir with large and small files) and doing MD5 checksum on them.

BTW, I’m also using a Sil3114 with 4.2.1 so there is no Unraid incompatibility with this controller.

Turns out it was just the one drive that was getting the errors.  Replaced it and did a parity check 0 errors.

Sata 1 jumper limit should not cause any errors.

 

One more thing to consider, some weeks ago I was having corruption problems copying files to my server, I’m using a user share with 14 disks and it only happened sometimes, after some troubleshooting I finally isolated the problem to when I copied files to the drives connect to a Sil3112 controller, the controller was bad. If I had the parity drive on this controller I would get errors every time I run parity check. You can easily check this by copying some files (I used a 10gb dir with large and small files) and doing MD5 checksum on them.

 

BTW, I’m also using a Sil3114 with 4.2.1 so there is no Unraid incompatibility with this controller.

 

Thanks for your contribution. I'm hoping my BIOS update will solve issues.

Update: All problems solved (for now) by moving to a Promise TX4 4-port SATAII controller. I'll update the BIOS on the SIL and then keep it for later, or sell it.