Re: RAID controllers - BIOS conflict - pls help

On Mon, 15 May 2006 05:58:22 -0400, George Macdonald
<fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

....snip...

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.:-)
Got response from MSI that flashing the latest BIOS would fix it. But
it is marked as beta, and I am hesitant to use any beta software, let
alone flashing it. Also have a problem finding in my pile of spare
parts a floppy drive (don't even have it installed in this system),
and MSI site explicitly warns against using any other boot device to
flash ;-)

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

If I hit <Esc> when prompted on boot, Promise BIOS gets skipped, VIA
SATA loads normally, but then Promise thinks the drives are not
assigned to any logical drive, and suggest to build it. It builds
RAID5, lets it be formatted, but then after the next reboot thinks
there is no logical drive defined, and suggests to rebuild the RAID
again... and again...and again... Maybe it's different for other RAID
levels, but looks that 5 must be loaded in BIOS regardless of being
bootable.

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.

Couldn't find anything close to that, in either Promise BIOS setup or
their GUI-based tool. Will wait for Promise reply. If they don't
suggest anything short of flashing the mobo, I'll have to take a deep
breath and flash that beta BIOS...

But thanks anyway

NNN



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