Hi I have and old HP 8756C with a 40GB IDE HDD and a 500GB SATA drive connected to a rosewill rc-212 PCI IDE controller.

I've just installed Ubuntu 7.10 server edition and then the xfce desktop. The IDE controller is throwing an error on boot

"expansion ROM not initialized - PCI mass storage Controller in slot 2"
Bus:01 Device:09, Function:00
Press <F1> to set up, <F2> to resume

This PC is supposed to be a file server. Can I use Ubuntu or am I forced to go back and set this up as a WAMP server instead? I would really like to get this working in Linux.

Is it possible to use an RC-212 or am I screwed? I'm prefer to move to another distribution if anyone thinks I would have sucess.

Usually this is down to a BIOS issue and a flash upgrade sorts things out - you say 'go back', does that mean that windows worked before? Seems strange as the OS hasn't kicked in yet - or are you seeing this error reported within Ubunutu?

What other devices are plugged in? Try taking out other devices (Sound cards etc) if possible as it may be that your old BIOS can't handle too many ROM extensions.

Unknown_User thanks for the reply.

I've not had this working in windows but it does come with a CD and instructions to install so to see if it would work, I re installed windows XP but the same error is coming up so I guess it's not an OS issue at all. However if you have any more ideas I'd appreciate any help.

I had a wireless PCI card and a telephone modem so I removed both. The wireless card was working so I moved the SATA card into that slot to rule out a bad PCI slot. Only the network card in the other used slot and 2 empty ones now.

The error reads the same just now for slot 1

I've also updated the BIOS to the latest version I could find
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/s...tem=pv-17893-1

But the error remained the same. I tried swapping out the DVD drive too with the original CD-ROM but that had no effect either.

I've checked all cables are tight and reseated everything that can be reseated.

I was told this card would work but now I'm thinking I was given bad advice. Is this $30 down the river?

Would another card have the same problems? Will I be destined to run my sata drive in an external case?

OK, seems as if you have taken every step to check thus far.

The Rosewill RC-212 card is well recommended and is known to work with Linux however this would appear to be more of a problem in marrying together the new with the old.

Do you have another PC that you can test the card in? A more modern machine may recognise the card and attached drive. If not you may have a faulty PCI card.

Only one other thought is the (I believe) that the card has jumpers for RAID configuration, SATA/IDE combinations etc. Google says that the guide is in Chinglish so it may not be easy to tell but are they set correctly? Long shot but you never know...

Update:
Tried the card in another machine and it was detected on boot and the drive was available to the install. I haven't tried to make it bootable although I'm sure it would work. I have the original 30GB IDE as my root and the 500gb SATA as /home. It now works well.