Two Promise controllers don't work together

[Tony2 0]

I have a Giga-Byte GA-7DXR+ motherboard with an AMD 2000+ CPU.

I use the onboard Promise 20276 PATA RAID controller with a pair of Maxtor drives in RAID 1 configuration. This works well and is fairly fast, no problems

 

I have just fitted a Promise S150 SX4-M SATA RAID card with a set of Maxtor SATA disks. This sees the disks and builds a RAID 5 array ok

 

But, when I try to boot the system, the BIOS does not recognise both controller correctly. It only sees the S150 not the onboard one.

 

I have upgraded the MB BIOS to the latest version.

 

I know there used to be problems with multiple Promise controllers but I thought they had fixed that. Does anyone have any information that can help me please.

 

thanks

[jmmijo 1]

It appears that the Promise SATA RAID controller is being initialized first before the onboard Promise controller is.

 

Try swapping the SATA RAID controller to another PCI slot until the onboard controller gets initialized first.

 

The other issue could be that both controllers are trying to use the same address space for their own BIOS rom, I do believe that Promise has an option to adjust this in the Controller config/setup options.

[Tony2 0]

jmmijo

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

I am old and cynical :-( and used to manufacturers totally ignoring their customers pleas for help. I had completely forgotten that Promise actually do care and do help. I e-mailed them this morning and 2 hours later I had a reply.

 

Unfortunatly they have solved the old problem of two controllers interfearing with each other, but only on the new SATA cards. So my old imbedded controller is a non starter.

 

So, its back to individual disks, Ghost for the sys partition and a data synchroniser utility for the data partition. One step forward, one step back. Now next year ........ :-))