SIlicon Image 3112 PCI SATA controller; connecting harddrives makes boot fail
 

I have a SiL3112 PCI SATA controller card that i have used in another computer for quite a while without any problems. Now I am trying to use it in this computer (Athlon 1GHz, 256Mb RAM). If I just plug it into a PCI slot and boot without any harddrives connected to it then everything goes fine, it's BIOS flashes up it's little message, and the computer boots from the main (PATA) harddrive. However if I plug a harddrive (Seagate Barracuda 200GB) into the card then the BIOS stops at 'varifying DMI data...' and doesn't even try to boot from the CD. I am very puzzeled by this as the card worked perfectly on the other computer, which was a similar machine.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Similar machines but not the same, I would suggest comparing the BIOSs of the two machines and see if anything stands out as being different. Possibly try upgrading the BIOS to the latest revision on the machine your having problems with.

Yes, that did the trick (BIOS Upgrade). I did think I might have to upgrade the BIOS, but i was hoping to avoid it as I couldn't find the model of the motherboard and messing about with DOS boot disks and the flash utilities designed for windows is never much fun in Linux. Though on closer inspection I found the motherboard's model hidden between two PCI slots with cards in.

Cheers

Hello,

I have a similar SATA chipset(Silicon Image 3512) on a Sunix PCI card and I have exactly the same problem. My mainboard's model is QDI's Kinetiz 7B/E and I am using an Athlon 1.2. After 2 hours of searching (qdi's support sucks) I managed to upgrade my BIOS to the latest version but I am still having the same problem. I tested the card to another PC (newer) and it worked perfectly ok. I am using Debian with the latest kernel (custom built) which it seems that supports this chipset but I can't really do anything with that if the problem starts from the mainboard. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance