Very Strange Silicon Raid Card Problems

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Aris Sokratov

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May 31, 2013
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Hi all,

I have an older PC, pentium 4, 1gb ram, and I just installed 3x 500GB eSATA drives with a Silicon 3114 RAID card. I have an additional eSATA and SATA drive each plugged directly into motherboard along with an IDE where my freshly installed XP is installed. Total of 5 drives, 1IDE with OS, 1 SATA, 3x eSATA.

When I boot, the IDE, Sata, and eSATA plugged into the motherboard all show in bios but the card does not, the next screen is recognizing the RAID card and the additional 500GB hard drives attached asking me to press F4 to launch RAID utility.

Within XP neither My Computer nor Disk management show the additional drives, but when I go into the RAID card properties the drives show up and when I go to update RAID drivers it says the divice is working fine.

So I downloaded the non-RAID and RAID (looking to set up non-RAID, just for extra space) drivers and when I go to update drivers for the RAID card, it shows the one folder throwing files at the other folder saying its installing the driver files, but this never stops. And when I say never, I left it "installing" the RAID drivers overnight last night and they still weren't installed by morning, still going. At this point, the next, back, and cancel buttons are all grayed out and I can't click either, the only way to get out of the "installation" is to ctr+alt+del and force close from Task Manager.

Most strange of all, upon the installation of XP, the drivers and XP were installed freshly at the same time.

Sorry for the epic, just wanted to be as clear as possible. Head scratcher, huh?
 
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smorizio

smorizio

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Jan 22, 2010
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Sounds like an old Irq or memory range issue. Have you tried turning off comm ports and sound and other onboard devices to see if there was an issue. Have you tried moving the card to another slot in case the slot you installed the card into is sharing the Irq and memory range with the video card.
 
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Aris Sokratov

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May 31, 2013
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Thank you for your answer. I'm not very familiar with irq memory, which is a little above my head. The PCI RAID card is the only card in the machine, so maybe the fact that I have it on the bottom of the 3 available PCI ports plays a roll. I didn't try the comm ports as I try to be very careful in BIOS, but I did check that all of the drives and cards were read and enabled. I'll toy around with the hardware setup itself; is the Irq something that I should learn from others before attempting myself? So I don't kill my system?

Another interesting thing to note in case it helps, the eSATA that's plugged straight into the motherbaord was plugged in before the fresh XP install and had 50% data free...After the reformat, the drive was blank and unpartitioned.
 
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popatim

popatim

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Perhaps your external drive is formatted in exFat and you will need update KB955704 to enable XP to 'see' the contents once again.

as for the drives on the silicon controller card. Did you add the drives as single drives, or sometimes you create a 1 drive raid0 or 1, in the cards bios? See the card's owners manual for what to do but XP wont see your drives until you create something in the cards firmware.
 
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Aris Sokratov

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May 31, 2013
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I just plugged the PCI controller and reformatted Windows XP, installing the drivers as I reformatted. Plugged the drives in and here I am, no RAID set up. I'm missing the power cable to one of the eSATA drives, so I only have 2 plugged in right now and the RAID menu won't let me create any RAID setup. Downloaded and installed several drivers, none worked. UPDATED: I can install the drivers now, but they still don't lead to visible drives. Before when booting it would list the drives
0) 499GB hard drive and
3) 499GB hard drive.

Now it's simply saying "2 499GB hard drives" and then waits a second and says, "No divice found! Press ctrl+s or F4 to setup RAID", with Windows loading after this 50% of the time, and not doing anything 50% of the time.

Tried changing COMM ports, couldn't find where to do that. IRQ in BIOS is set to Auto and in Windows it comes up as irq 27.

No support for users manuals online that I could find, downloaded and installed the software from the Silicon page and that won't run, re-downloaded and installed, still won't run. As you can probably tell, I'm about hitting that point of pulling my hair out. lol.
 
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popatim

popatim

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Looks like you have 2 choices.
1: you need to flash the bios to the IDE bios first then you can use the base drivers.
or
2: keep the raid bios and raid drivers then setup a raid on each individual drive but for the raid type select passthru. You can use the SIL sataraid management utility to do this. You might also be able to speed things up by using the management utility, selecting Devices at the top left of the screen and selecting 'Make Pass-thru" from the list. This will bring up a list off all the attached drives and you can just click on the drives and then follow the prompts.

All the downloads are available at www.siliconimage.com/support
just select sil3114 from the dropdown list.
 
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Aris Sokratov

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May 31, 2013
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Still having issues with this. Downloaded the IDE Bios for the card itself, flashed it, now the card reads as not powering on, not working and I can't get in Windows to flash the BIOS of the card to anything else. I hope it's not totally hosed. Whatever ends up happening, Silicon cards, back to Promise cards.
 
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