Trouble adding Silicon Sata 3114 controller card

[hobbyaddict]

Hello All, I need help in configuring my pci controller card.

older Dell Dimension 4550
120 gig IDE Drive

adding Silicon Sata 3114 controller card
adding 2 seagate 1 terabyte drives

Upon boot up system hangs when drives are plugged in the card.

If I boot, then plug in the sata drives to the card, the drives are recognized?ALL works as needed.
Goal
I want to boot off the IDE, use this for the op system. Store all our valuable data on #1 sata and backup data with #2 sata Raid is not necessary I can use back up software to back up folders required.
I need to get this to follow through the boot sequence.

Note- this is a new load, I had a major a virus and re-installed all devices. after doing thissssss looking in the device manager I have sucessfully loaded all drivers and devices. Except... one PCI input device, unfortunately I do not know what device is missing> If I remove the new PCI sata card the eror still occurs.


Please let me know if you need any additional information.
I have the second primary drive set to auto in bios, it will not reconize the card/harddrives? hardware unknown.

Thanks

 

[hobbyaddict]

Windows XP/Loaded all service packs, also figured out what the PCI error.
All devices in device manager show that they are working propoerly

 

[hobbyaddict]

additional information:
When sata drives are plugged into the controller when booting..
message occurs:
SIL 3144 Sataraid Bios ver 5.0.39 1997-2004
Ctlr +S or F4 for raid utility
0 ST31000528AS

System hangs will not go into any utility for selecting options

When booting with out drives plugged into controler
Ctlr +S or F4 for raid utility
selecting the options produces
"No device detected"

Continuing will allow the computer to boot up properly
device manager shows all devices working properly no yellow warning anywhere.

Is there anyway to skip over the searching of the card during the boot process?

 

[hobbyaddict]

nothing?

 

[hobbyaddict]

I resolved the problem

 

[TOGGMAN]

I resolved the problem

Hey Hobbyaddict can you share what you did? I am in the same boat. A new dell 860 with two 1TB drives and it will hang and not let me in to configure????

 

[hobbyaddict]

Basically it came down to upgrading the bios on the controller card.

I went to the dell site, downloaded the latest bios for the motherboard. Mine was an old computer. I updated the bios(easy to do, run in windows)

I also needed use the small jumpers that came with the hard drives. These jumpers were used on the hard drives themselves. You need to read to see if your controller card can handle the new drives. (If not you may need to use them as well). *check this out first* (instructions are with hard drive)

I had to go to the 3114 chip manufacturer's website . (Silicon image was stated on the controller card package- googled the site -Siliconimage.com)

I then downloaded the drivers AND bios for the 3114 chipset (this was the chip on my controller card)
installed/updated the drivers via windows device manager

The bios needs to be updated... The method depends on your card. some can be flashed in windows... Go through the device manager find the controller card (just like updating the drivers) and look... some have an extra tab that allows the bios to be flashed.(COULD BE MUCH EASIER)

In my case I did not have the tab...
The Silicon image site had utilities to help upgrade the controller card bios
Window and Dos

I tried the windows utility with no luck.

For Dos, You will need a boot disk
floppy,cd or USB will work (I made one from downloading freedos, googled this as well) (copy this on the same type of media, insert after system is booted-perhaps you can copy it on the same disk?)

Boot the system with the boot disk then run the downloaded dos utility specifying the bios file. In my case it was

UPDFlash
the b550.bin (bios file i downloaded)

ie...
UPDFlash b550.bin

You will then get a code 0 successfuly updated bios.
Then everything works!

After it was all said and done it was easy however I don't do this kind of stuff so it took me a while... (a long while to read the sites and gather the info)

I hope this helps.

-Ed

 

[hobbyaddict]

Not wanting to direct you to another site... but a few folks on the site below responded and offered up some suggestions. Basically they suggested in detail the things I found. You may want to check out the thread as well.

http://club.myce.com/f34/silicon-sata-3114-controller-card-help-306769/

Good luck, it is nice to have this behind me

 

[hobbyaddict]

You said new computer? I was installing a new controller card because my old computer only supported IDE drives. If yours is new your drives should plug directly into the motherboard. Your problem sounds like it is different.

Did you get the hard drives ready for use? using the utility disk that comes with the hard drives?