Hello
I have (again) a weird problem.
Act 1
I bought a HighPoint RocketRaid 2300 PCIe-1 SATA RAID controller card. I am not planning to use it for RAID, but just in order to have 4 additional SATA connectors.
I then bought 4 Western Digital WD5000AAKS harddisks, each of them with a capacity of 500GB.
I connected the new SATA HDs to the new controller, powered up the PC, downloaded, compiled and installed the open source drivers from the HighPoint site - everything went fine but I still couldn't see the HDs using "fdisk -l".
I then opened the handbook of the controller and read that if I didn't plan to use the RAID functionality I had to at least "Initialize" the HDs and set them all up as single JBODs in the BIOS of the card. As, the harddisks were listed in the RocketRaid BIOS as "new" I selected for all of them "Initialize" and set each single one as JBODx. I rebooted the PC and all the HDs were displayed by "fdisk -l". Very nice!
Act 2
The reason I did not want to use the RAID functionality of the card was that I did not want to depend on that particular card (what would I do if it would stop working?) but use "Software RAID" which works great in Linux.
So, just for the sake of testing I partitioned and formatted the drives, copied some files on them, shut down the PC, disconnected the drives from the SATA plugs of the card and connected them directly to the motherboard. Powered back on the PC and ....... got during the boot a message saying something like "Failed to identify SATA port x-x" (or something similar - I'll check again once I'm back home).
Act 3
I tried out all possible things - swap SATA ports on the motherboard, deactivate AHCI and run everything in Legacy mode, connected those HDs to an older machine with an ASUS motherboard (instead of the Gigabyte where the RocketRaid is installed), delete the partitions, etc..., but the result is always the same:
- even if I delete all the HDs in the BIOS of the RocketRaid card, their status never goes back to "New" as it was at the real beginning, but always stays at least on "Initialized".
- if the HDs are connected to the RocketRaid controller (a single one or all of them, doesn't matter) they work but if I connect them to the SATA port of some other device (I tried with the Asus & Gigabyte motherboards) they DON'T EVEN SPIN UP! They don't move!
Unfortunately what I didn't do at the very beginning (before "Initializing") was to try to connect them to the motherboard, so I'm not sure they would have worked. But I think so, as the controller recognizes them.
So, now I am in a position where the HDs work only when they are connected to the RocketRaid controller. This dependency is exactly what I didn't want to have... .
What I will try next are all
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....8290141#jumper these different settings, but to be honest it would be the first time I have to set jumpers of SATA drives in order to make them work.
What do you think?
01.01.2008 - Happy New Year!
Tried all the jumper-settings. None of them worked.
02.01.2008
I think I tried EVERYTHING, but nothing worked. I give up.
12.01.2008
I lied - didn't give up
I am now to disable "power-on in standby" and "staggered spin-up"...
http://forums.storagereview.net/inde...howtopic=25650
http://www.getphpbb.com/phpbb/viewto...m=lcabla&p=504
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm
http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/for...p-32550-4.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-id.../msg04323.html
http://www.linuxhq.com/patch-howto.html
http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/
http://www.getphpbb.com/phpbb/viewto...m=lcabla&p=465
http://www.hdat2.com/
...but nothing worked yet. But hdat2 tells me that "power-on in standby" for those HDs is on, but unluckily I cannot disable it.
