sec

I've got this board and alot of disks and so I'm facing a problem.

The Silicon Image Controller for the s-ata is not letting me have any single disks on it, I have to make it "JBOD" for that and I don't want that. Cause in the bios I can't see my Nvidia Raid with my two raptors cause I've got so many disks.

So the question is. Is it possible to make the SI controller work with single disk without making them JBOD?

And/or is it possible to see more then 7 disks in the bios on the Hard disk Boot section ? cause I wanna be able to start my damn windows when I've fixed the disk.

clintfan

Hi sec, and welcome to the forum! Guess nobody answered this yet, I'll take a stab at it...

No, I could be wrong but I don't think so.

Though the manual omits the Onboard Devices Config screenshot, the only BIOS choice for the SiliconImage is on/off. There seems to be no option to run non-RAID disks on this controller. Really, this is typical of most SATA controller chips, except for the Promise PDC20378 and Intel ICH5R/6R, and maybe one other one. Most will only let you run SATA drives in RAID mode, and desktop RAID usually implies at least 2 drives attached to the chip.

Have you tried creating a RAID0 "array" with just that one drive? Some setup utilities will let you do that, even though it isn't really RAID.



I don't know. I don't see why not. The Boot- Hard Disk Drives menu only needs to list the dHDD's eleible to boot from, not all HDD's in the box. The mobo can plug 12 storage devices, not counting USB HDD's or HDD's attached to a PCI add-on card. And RAID usually combines HDD's down into one, which should actually reduce the total choice count.

AFAIK, every detected HDD should appear in the pulldown menus for "1st Drive, 2nd Drive", etc.. If you are not seeing all your HDD's, then it seems you've hit some Asus artificial BIOS table limit, and you need to contact Asus and make them aware of the issue. A fix to the BIOS code would cure that issue... relatively simple, unless for some reason they've run out of space and can't easily increase the number of visble HDD's.

Btw I hope you're running some big huge 650W power supply if you've got 8 HDD's plus the rest of it.

Hope this helps,

-clintfan

skott2

Hello,
I need help. I have set this up before, but I can't seem to do it again...I want to set up RAID1 on an ASUS A8n-SLI Deluxe board with 2 sata II 160 gig maxtor drives.
I recall something about having the SI disabled and the Nvidia raid controller enabled with the sata locations enabled (1-4).
I used the Nvida raid manager and created my strip raid, I stream lined my XPSP2 disk to include both drivers.
Windows sees the raw unpartioned volume, starts to install and asks me to create a new partion. I do this and when the setup asks if I want to do a quick format or std. it starts and fails. ( I have tried both options).
Q: What options do I need to do in the BIOS to make this right?
Q: What am I doing wrong?
I have tried to use the silicon raid config and it reports that no devices found utilities are disabled...press any key to continue.