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Cannot boot with new SATA Controller Installed

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Situation: New Rosewill RC-201 SATA RAID Controller PCI card installed to add 2 SATA drives to older IDE-only motherboard (eMachines 2615, ECS L7VMM)

Problem: With SATA drives installed and the one IDE boot drive (jumpered to Master), boot gets right up to the point when the Windows XP logo should show and just freezes. (Boots fine with RAID card installed, but no SATA drives hooked up.)

Troubleshooting:

I have,

1) Updated Windows and Rosewill RAID drivers
2) Removed PCI cards (wireless Ethernet, Hauppauge PVR-150, PNY GeForce 6200)
3) Fiddled with BIOS boot sequence
4) Tried booting from SCSI with the SATA drive

I haven’t tried flashing the BIOS yet. (Didn’t want to make things worse.)

And the funniest thing: I can connect the SATA drive “hot” and they work just fine, so I’m pretty sure the RAID card is okay. So…as long as I never have to reboot, I’ll be just fine. 🙁

Topic

Clarifications

In reply to Cannot boot with new SATA Controller Installed

Clarifications

Power supply?

In reply to Cannot boot with new SATA Controller Installed

Seeing the fact that it is an eMachine, I suspect the power supply is insufficient to spin everything up to speed during boot. Once booted and everything is powered up, of course you could plug it in “hot”. There isn’t a huge power drain bringing everything else up at that exact moment.

Power supply seems okay

In reply to Power supply?

Hmmm…I hadn’t thought about that since I have added a few extras lately, but I just tried hooking up the new SATA to the controller using an external case as its power and still was unable to boot. Thanks for the suggestion, tho.

Same problem

In reply to Power supply seems okay

I’m having the same problem… using an Addonics ADSA3GPX8-4E… it will not boot into Windows with this card… i’ve tried messing with the boot sequence, but no luck..

have you found a solution yet??

Same problem

In reply to Power supply seems okay

I’m having the same problem… using an Addonics ADSA3GPX8-4E… it will not boot into Windows with this card… i’ve tried messing with the boot sequence, but no luck..

have you found a solution yet??

No solution yet

In reply to Same problem

Unfortunately, I haven’t fixed the issue. I’m running the drives okay (after hooking them up “hot”). The mfg told me they are still working on a solution for me, as well.

If it isnt getting to the Windows boot part

In reply to Cannot boot with new SATA Controller Installed

something is wrong between your BIOS and the SATA controller.
My first thought would be to update the BIOS, and look in the documentation under troubleshooting for the card.

I would bet it doesn’t like BOTH IDE and SATA

In reply to Cannot boot with new SATA Controller Installed

at the same time.

This would be especially true with this older system.

Disconnect the IDE and see what you get. Bet your getting a conflict.

IDE/SATA Conflict

In reply to I would bet it doesn’t like BOTH IDE and SATA

Pretty sure you guys are right about the IDE/SATA conflict. I disconnected the IDE cable and tried booting from one of the SATA drives, but it didn’t like that, either. So for now, I’m going to live with reconnecting the SATA drives after boot up — which isn’t that big of a deal since this is my 24/7 HTPC. I’ll post back once I get up the courage to flash the BIOS. Thanks for the help.

You could try this :)

In reply to IDE/SATA Conflict

It may tell you what you are missing.

Start up the PC without the Sata Drives connected and modify your
Boot.ini File. Add the line under Modified.

This is a sample of a default Boot.ini file from a Windows XP Professional computer.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect
> < Modified. [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect mmulti(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Safe Mode" /safeboot:minimal /sos /bootlog This switch turns on boot logging to a file that is named systemroot\Ntbtlog.txt. Shutdown the PC and reconnect the Drives. Restart the PC and select Safe Mode. Either it will start or wait until it locks up before shutting down and removing the Sata Drives. Restart the PC and navigate to Ntbtlog.txt and check, then make a note of the devices and services that did not load. Any errors also 🙂 Rob

if it were me..

In reply to Cannot boot with new SATA Controller Installed

i would go ahead with the bios flash

http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Downloads/ProductsDetail_Download.aspx?detailid=61&DetailName=Bios&DetailDesc=L7VMM%20%20(V1.0A)&CategoryID=1&MenuID=82&LanID=0

its pretty old though so you may already have that version……..

Motherboard Bios and Bios on the SATA card are conflicting

In reply to Cannot boot with new SATA Controller Installed

I know this is an old topic but I wanted to answer it for anyone the run into this issue in the future and may come across this in a web search.

The Motherboard Bios and Bios on the SATA card are conflicting. I had this same problem with a card I had that was Sil 3114 based and had all but given up on using that card until today. I needed more ports and I was determined to sort this out. I tried a fresh install of Windows and same issue. I tried updating the Bios on the Sil SATA controller and still same issue.

I was able to resolve this by erasing the BIOS flash on the Sil SATA controller. if the Bios chip is removable just remove it if not boot to DOS and run UPDFLASH.exe if you know what type of flash memeory you have select it from the list. If not and i did not i selected option 7. read the bios version and then erased the flash. After erase I read the version to verify it was blank and exit.

Reboot PC with drives attached and install the driver from Sil. this should work for similar cards even if they are not exactly the same. i did not need any RAID functionality out of the card just additional ports for more drives and the card is now detected as an SATA storage controller and working great.

If you have question just reply to this thread and I will try to help.

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