Hello Linuxusers, I have the following Problem:
I have an ASUS P3B-F Motherboard and connected an IDE HDD to Primary Master of the onboard controller, additionally I have an PCI-SATA-RAID Card by SiliconImage (SiI 3114).

If there's no HDD Connected to the SATA Card the PC Boots perfect (from hdd, floppy & cd).
But if I connect a SATA HDD to the raid-controller, no boot device works.
If i try to boot from hdd GRUB says: "GRUB Loading stage1.5 // GRUB Loading, please wait..." and hangs.
When I boot from cd or floppy nothing appears on the screen and the system hangs.

The SATA HDD is a 200GBdrive and the bios only supports 128GB Drives, but I dont want to boot from the satadrive...
The P3B-F has had the Bios Version 1006 and I flashed it to the newest available 1008.004 but nothing helped.
I have tried to boot with GRUB and LILO, I tried every combination of LILO's compat/lba32/linear with the BIOS Setting for the primary HDD (LBA, large, normal, ...) nothing helped.
I tried to map the devices in GRUB's devices.map (like this: (hd?) /dev/hda) , i used 0, 1 and 4 for the ?) it didnt help.

I hope someone has an idea what I could do
spq

Hopefully this solution will work better for you than me. According to some research I did around the net, the SiI3114 card has boot problems with the factory BIOS. The solution is, supposedly, to update the card's BIOS to the latest version 5.4.0.3. The BIOS may be downloaded from Silicon Image's site
http://www.siliconimage.com/docs/BIO...4-x10_5403.zip

SI recommends using the SiFlashTool inside of Windows but this tool would never work for me. I finally got the card's BIOS to accept updates by using the DOS Flash Tool, UPDFLASH.EXE, which can be found at the same site
http://www.siliconimage.com/docs/UpdFlash_v336.zip

Here's the procedure that worked for me:
1. Create a DOS-bootable floppy. I made mine in Windows XP by selecting the MS-DOS bootable option when formating.
2. Copy UPDFLASH.EXE, r5403bin & b5403.bin to the newly made floppy.
3. If you have more than one of the SiI3114 cards in the same system, remove all but one, otherwise you'll have to specify which card to update.
4. Boot from the floppy.
5. Run this command: UPDFLASH.EXE r5403.bin
Follow the prompts and you'll see the card's BIOS get updated.

The difference between the b and r versions of the BIOS is for RAID(r) and non-RAID(b) cards. Mine shipped with a RAID menu, so I used the r version to flash my BIOS. Yours may be different for some reason.

*************** CAVEAT *********************
The above shows how to flash the cards BIOS to the current version. However, this did not solve the problem for me. After updating to the most current BIOS, I still have boot problems. I did get it to work a few times but nothing reliable. I don't know if this is related to the card or my system.

So, Good Luck!

SPQ;

Most older mobos will not accept having two boot bios
devices onboard.
I had a older ASUS TUV4X that had the same problem.
I ended up getting a SATA controller without a boot BIOS.
and all worked fine after that, although I had to have an
EIDE Drive installed to hold the boot loader and windoz
with linux installed on the SATA drive.
The SATA card I used was from COMPUSA with a
VIA VT6421a chipset on it.



Good Luck

rcb

I just like to post to say thank you to kenphillips for his post. I had upgraded my fileserver to 1TB disks from 250GB Disks, and I found that my two Sil3114 pci cards would hang when trying to detect them. After trying all sorts of things I came across this post and decided to flash the Bios. I made the boot floppy and put the updflash.exe and bin files. Booted it and ran "updflash r5403.bin". It detected both PCI cards and flashed the bios on both of them. Now it detects my disks fine and everything is working.

Thank you!

hey guys,

i have the same card sil3114, i have got it with the RAID options, but with 5.3.14 BIOS version, which is quiet old.

after i have installed CentOS 5.5 on the 1TB HD which plugged to the SATA port on that card, i couldn't to boot from it, though i could to boot from a DVD that was connected to the same card.

after i have updated the BIOS to 5.5.0.0 which is the latest one, it booted fine.

just let you know that when you update the BIOS there is to kinds, one with RAID support and the other without which is IDE, i have used the IDE because i didn't need the RAID support.

i did the update via an Hireon's boot CD 11.0, via the Mini XP, because i didn't have any diskette at the time, so i updated with the windows utility that you can find it with all of the BIOS updates on the Silicon Image site.

i think that it is good to keep that thread updated, because i bout my card just a month ago.
thanks.