New to this forum.
I bought an IDE RAID controller card (PCI). I'm not sure who made it, but it has a Silicon Image Sil0680 chip on it. There are, of course, no Linux drivers with it -- but that doesn't really matter, because I never get that far.
When I try to boot up, a message appears on the screen (still in BIOS): Press F3 to enter configure utility (or words to that effect). But typing F3 has no effect. It is completely ignored. After a second or two, the message disappears and the boot continues. A short time later, several seconds after the GRUB messages, linux complains that it can't figure out the card, then it panics and dies.
I think all would be well if I could get into the configure utility during the bios part of the boot.
Any ideas on that?
Failing that, if I could get some info on how to configure the thing as a standard IDE controller, by depositing stuff into the PCI-configuration registers, I could write the code to do it.
The stupid card comes up with PCI class-code 01 80 00, which is silly, and undefined. It should boot up as 01 01 xx, which is IDE controller, as default. Then linux would probably know how to do something with it. I don't need the RAID features, just want another IDE controller.
I can't find anything on PCI-configuration for RAID controllers, though I've found lots on IDE controllers. I don't even know if it's standardized.
I tried contacting Silicon Image by e-mail, but got a brush-off. Not interested in users, will only talk to OEMs.
-- Phil