[SOLVED] X7SPA-H with AOC-SASLP-MV8 won't boot with 12 drives

[jtown]

I'm tearing my hear out on this one.  Okay, not really.  Just swearing a lot.  I've had my 11 drive setup running great for a while and managed to snag 3 of those "cheap" Western Digital 2tb drives Best Buy is clearing out right now for $80.  Trouble is my system won't boot if I add a 12th drive.  I think I've narrowed it down to the motherboard crapping out with boot selection when there are more than 12 bootable devices attached (including the USB stick) so I'm digging around my office to find my bootable USB stick with DOS so I can update the BIOS but I was wondering if anyone else has run into this problem.  Here's my working setup:

 

Supermicro X7SPA-H motherboard

Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 controller

PC Power and Cooling Silencer 760 power supply (single 12v rail at 62 amps)

3x Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B racks

11x misc. 2tb drives

Geek Squad 256 meg USB stick

 

It all works just peachy until I try to add a 12th hard drive.  The drives all initialize fine and are detected but the boot doesn't happen.  The first boot device is set to the USB stick in the BIOS but it just sits at a flashing cursor at the point when I should be getting the unRAID boot loader.  Same result if I hit F11 and manually select the USB stick.  If I disable hard drive boot entirely in the BIOS, I get a message to insert a disk with a boot partition and press any key.  If I remove any drive, the system begins to boot normally.  Doesn't matter if it's plugged into the onboard controller or the MV8.  This leads me to believe the BIOS isn't able to handle an environment with more than 12 bootable devices connected.

 

Has anyone else run into this with the X7SPA-H motherboard?  If so, how did you deal with it?

 

Thanks.

[ohlwiler]

Disable INIT 13h in your SASLP bios. This will make all drives on the SASLP unable to be a boot device.

[jtown]

Then I have a dumb followup question.  How do I enter the card's BIOS?  It doesn't prompt me that I can tell...Nevermind.  The "Press ^M to enter BIOS or space to continue" flashed by so fast my cruddy LCD couldn't sync before the screen switched back to the motherboard's POST display.  Had to hook up an old CRT to catch it.

 

And that did the trick.

 

Muchas gracias!