Using NVRAID and SiL3114 on ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe MOBO

Raistlfiren · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Oct 2005 Posts: 100

Hey,
I am not sure if this is Gentoo related, but I think it is relevant. First off I have the ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe motherboard with the 4 x 1.5 SATA Silicon Image 3114R Raid controller and the NVRAID controller that supports 4 x 3.0Gb/s. On the SiL3114 chipset I have the following drives hooked up respectively Samsung 500GB, Samsung 500 GB, Seagate 1.5TB, and Seagate 1.5TB... On the NVRAID(well not raided) it contains a WD250 GB and a Maxtor 500 GB. The WD250 holds gentoo on it. For some reason or another the WD250 GB is not detected at all at boot up if the drive is in slot 1 on the MOBO, but it does on slot 3 or 4, why I don't know(So it is currently in 4)... The computer just sits there and reboots if it is in slot 1 or 2. The issue is that gentoo detects the SiL3114 first and sets the WD250 as SDE/F depending upon how the Maxotr is connected, is there anyway to make that SDA so it doesn't change upon how many more drives I add onto the NVAID chipset? I have tryed putting the WD250 GB drive onto the SiL3114 chipset, but it's like it isn't detected whatsoever and tells me it can't find an OS.(No Disk or Disk Failure)

Thanks for any help,
Ratty

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 9:02 pm Post subject:

Raistlfiren,

It looks like you have a mix of 1.5Gbit and 3Gbit controllers and drives.

When you put a 1.5Gb drive onto a 3Gb controller, it usually works. The controller falls back to 1.5Gb.
The other way round, a 3Gbit drive on a 1.5Gbit controller often fails (but its supposed to work too.)
Drive vendors usually make 3Gbit drives with a jumper to force 1.5Bit operation.
Thats probably why your 250Gb drive is not detected on the Sil3114 controller.

To avoid drives and partitions being renumbered, you can use volume labels to describe things to the kernel, or better, UUIDs.
Labels are properties of filesystems and not all filesystems support them. UUIDs are supported everywhere but you will need kernel and grub patches, which I don't think are in Gentoo yet.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Raistlfiren · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Oct 2005 Posts: 100

Thanks, Neddyseagon! Well, I thought the same thing about UUIDs, but wasn't really sure how to use them under gentoo. I have used them a bit with other distrobutions. The WD250 GB hard drive seems to be getting detected at bootup on the Silicone Image Chipset because it displays it on boot, but it seems as though the BIOS doesn't see there is a bootable system on the drive, that is when the error: NO Disk or Disk Failure error appears. It doesn't seem to be a problem though on the regular SATA 3.0GB/s ports/NVRAID....