Re: RAID controllers - BIOS conflict - pls help

On Sun, 14 May 2006 23:07:20 GMT, "nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx"
<mygarbage2000@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"I have a MSI Master2-FAR (VIA K8T800 chipset) dual Opteron 242 system
with boot drive on built-in VIA SATA RAID controller. I installed
Promise FastTrak SX4100 (SATA RAID controller - 32 bit PCI, hardware
RAID 5 engine) and 3 WD 250GB drives. When I configured the drives as
RAID 5, I received the message "PCI ROM space is NOT enough", and then
the board was unable to load VIA RAID controller to boot off it.
However, when I connected the same drive to a free port on SX4100
instead of onboard SATA, the system booted just fine (Win2k), and both
RAID controllers were in device manager. However this solution is not
acceptable because my intent was to have bootable RAID1 on VIA and
RAID5 on SX4100 reserved for data. Please let me know how to ensure
that Promise SX4100 BIOS loads AFTER VIA SATA BIOS, so that my old
boot configuration could be restored."

The msg above is a copy of what I sent to both MSI and Promise
support. So far no reply from any of them.

Google/Yahoo have a couple of hits on "PCI ROM space is NOT enough",
but only complaints and no solutions. Seems like Promise grabs so
much memory out of whatever is allocated for BIOS that no other device
can be loaded after that. Funny though that as long as no logical
drive is defined, everything goes fine and VIA SATA is recognized on
boot. Could not find anything in either SX4100 setup or mobo BIOS
setup that would help. Could it be that VIA SATA sucks? Would
another Promise/sil RAID controller solve the issue? All I want is
RAID1 as system drive and RAID5 as data drive. I guess I could go
SCSI for boot drive in worst case, but there is no guarantee that SCSI
BIOS would not conflict with Promise BIOS, either.

Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

Dunno about VIA SATA sucking:-) but I'm pretty sure this is a MSI BIOS
issue - a check at MSI Forum shows that people are getting similar ("Not
enough space to copy PCI option ROM 00:13:00") msgs even with a mix of
on-board chipset (VIA & nVidia) SATA RAID and on-board SIL SATA RAID.
Obviously there is a conflict between address spaces for the two RAID
firmwares in the Reserved Memory space (640K -> 1M)... if the msg is to be
believed.:-)

If you're booting off the VIA RAID, is it not possible to just disable the
Promise BIOS and let the OS driver load handlle the SX4100 RAID? Are you
sure the SX4100 BIOS is not set up to boot from the RAID-5?... thus causing
a conflict in boot device? ISTR that with SCSI, you can choose to not hook
the SCSI BIOS if there's no need to boot of a SCSI device.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald
.

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