Help please with my Promise SATA200 TX4

[str1der]

I have an Asus P5ld2 motherboard. I'm currently running 4 drives off of the built in SATA controller. I purchased a Promise SATA300 TX4 controller and 4 more drives. I shutdown the server, installed the card, connected the drives and restarted the server. When I go into the console the 4 new drives don't show up under DEVICES. I thought the unraid system would see them but they don't. Is there another step I need to do to get them to show up or is there something I can check to see if there is an error? Please help.

[Koolkiwi]

When I recently installed 2x Promise SATA300 TX4 cards into my Asus P5B-E motherboard, I first installed the cards and booted with no drives attached.  I then grabbed the syslog from the server to view, and confirm that the new TX4 cards were being detected correctly at startup (I could see what scsi id's and logical device id's were being assigned etc.).  Once I passed that test, I then used a spare SATA drive to individually test that the drive was detected by unRAID on all of the SATA ports.

I don't recall having any issues on my (albiet different model) Asus motherboard.

 

My first suggestion therefore, would be to check your syslog to see if the card is detected.

 

Also, did you see the Promise SATA BIOS message appear when you powered up the server?

[BillK]

I currently use two Promise SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA controller cards, but am unfamiliar with the Asus P5LD2 mb, so take all this with a grain of salt.

 

1.  Check to make sure the drives have power and all the cables are well seated.  Yes, I know that sounds obvious, but you should always start with the easy things first.

 

2.  On boot up, does the motherboard recognize the new drives?  With my Asus P5PE-VM, the motherboard first searches for all the IDE devices.  The screen then clears and it starts checking for all the SATA devices, which is when I identifies my six drives (although you only see the message for a second or two, so you need to be fast...koolkiwi's suggestion would give you more time).  If you fail this test, there's probably a BIOS setting that needs to be tweaked and/or there may be something wrong with the card itself.  Check with others on this bulletin board for BIOS setting recommendations.

 

3.  Move the card to a different PCI slot and see if that makes a difference.

[str1der]

Thanks for the replies. I was just coming back to let everyone know that it's working now. I had to move the card to a different slot to get it to work. The only thing that screwed me up is Linux moved my 4 new drives into the addresses that were previously occupied by the 4 drives that were connected to my onboard controller. Luckily I new the order or I could have really screwed it up when moving the drives back to their assignments.

[BillK]

Luckily I new the order or I could have really screwed it up when moving the drives back to their assignments.

 

Glad it worked out.

 

I'm not sure when/where it started, but I know several of us have described being thankful we'd built our own lists of drive/port assignments and saved it in a safe place for just such an occasion.  It probably a tip we need to include in the new wiki once it stands up.