SOLVED - Asus A88X-PRO motherboard not recognizing third SATA controller

[captain_video]

I upgraded my old server motherboard to an Asus A88X-PRO board with an AMD A10 7700K CPU.  The board has three PCI-e x16 slots (two 2.0 and one 3.0), two PCI-e x1 slots, and two PCI slots.  I installed three Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 controllers in the x16 slots and it only recognizes two of them.  I've checked all of the UEFI BIOS settings and forced it to use the onboard APU graphics in case it was looking for a graphics card in the first x16 slot.

 

I've tried various combinations of controllers in all slots and it works fine with just two controllers, regardless of which slots they're installed in.  When I add the third controller it still only sees two of them.  The controllers were tested previously in my old configuration and they all work fine.  I actually have four identical controller cards, all upgraded to firmware 0.21 with INT13 disabled and RAID disabled and only two of them are being recognized.

 

I had maxed out the SATA ports and PCI-e slots on my old board to get a 24-drive setup (two 8-port SATA controllers, six onboard SATA ports, and one dual-port Sil3132 SATA PCI-e x1 SATA controller).  I wanted to add a cache drive but had nothing to connect it to.  I was hoping the Asus board would allow me to use three 8-port controllers and free up the onboard SATA ports.  Right now I'm back to a similar setup using all six onboard ports, two 8-port controllers and one 2-port controller.  I can add another 2-port controller for the cache drive, but I would prefer to use the three 8-port controllers and keep the onboard ports available for any future expansion or additional cache drives.

 

Is there something that would be preventing the third controller from being recognized?  Am I missing some setting in the UEFI BIOS that would cause this?  This one has me completely stumped.

 

I should add that the server is running fine with the current setup.  I'm loving the new unRAID 6.0.  I just finished converting all of my reiserfs drives to xfs and it's working great!

[Squid]

Does unRaid recognize drives connected to all the controllers?  I recall that there are some issues with the SASLP where the BIOS wouldn't see all 3 of the controllers, but unRaid would no problem.

[captain_video]

Good question, but one that I can't answer.  The third controller would never seem to initialize (i.e., no scanning of the controller during POST and no LEDs on the controller lighting up).  I never let it fully boot into unRAID to see if the drives were all being recognized.  I suppose I could reconnect the third controller and see if that works.  Thanks for the tip.  It's certainly worth a shot.  Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to get to it until the weekend.

[captain_video]

I reinstalled the third AOC-SASLP-MV8 controller card and booted up the system.  Two of the cards initialized during POST and displayed the drives connected to them.  All of the yellow LEDS on each card lit up as it was being scanned.  The third card did not light up at all during POST.  After the two cards were initialized, the system rebooted and started booting unRAID.  When it progressed to the point of polling all of the drives I noticed that the LEDs on the third card lit up in sequence.  UnRAID finished booting and it appeared that all of the drives were showing up.  I checked the web GUI on my main PC and all of the drives were there.  I started the array and everything came online normally.  I then stopped the array and powered it down to install my 250GB SSD as the cache drive.  Everything booted back up fine and I assigned the new drive as the cache drive.  I forgot to set the file system for the drive so it formatted it as btrfs by default.  Since the rest of the array had been formatted as xfs I stopped the array and reformatted the cache drive with xfs.  Now I'm up and running with the new motherboard and SSD cache drive using three 8-port controllers.  I'm a happy camper. 

[MyKroFt]

The card bios only supports 2 cards for post display.  Mine does the same thing for the 3rd card.  Been running this way for a year. Now with no problems.. 

 

Myk