boot issue sata controller

[Brian03]

Hi,
First of all hello to everyone, my first post here on that fine website.
Here's my problem:
I've purchased 3 "SiI 3114 - PCI to 4 Port SATA" cards. I don't intend to make use of the RAID capabilities I just wan't to add SATA ports to my computer.
During boot procedure the 3 cards load and list the drives attached but then displays "no valid device". After that the OS doesn't load.
What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for your help

 

[Operandi]

You have three four port SATA cards in one machine?, that seems a little excessive.

Perhaps you can go into your BIOS and set the boot device to something long the lines of "SSCI" or "Add in Card".

Welcome to the forums btw. 🙂

 

[Brian03]

Thanks for your answer Operandi,
Unfortunately there is no such setting in my bios (motherboard is a Asus A8N5X).
By the way the 3 cards are needed; I'm actually building my own NAS and this seemed a cheap way to add hard disks. I didn't want to spend 600$ on an advanced 3Ware/Adaptec... controller, got mine for 20$ each.
Could there be some sort of conflict with the motherboard internal Raid (NVRAID) even if I disabled it?

 

[Operandi]

Possibly, with my board I also added in a SATA card to gain some extra ports. For whatever reason the add-in card need?s to be the boot device, drives on boards SATA controller still work but I am unable to boot the OS with them.

 

[Brian03]

Problem resolved 😀
In order to use my hard disks as single drives you need to configure the sil3114 chip and its attached drives as "Concatenation" (type 1). Apparently this is a method used by some manufacturer (like 3ware): JBOD refers to configuring drives without raid features including concatenation.... quiet stupid as this option is found under the RAID settings.
Anyway everything works fine now