ok guys, I need some help. my boss' machine is a gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra system (midrange socket A). I think the lovely silicon image si3112 onboard SATA RAID is fundamentally screwed this board. it might control a single sata drive, but not sata raid 1. tried and tried to no avail.
so, when i had to get my boss some new drives to format his machine, we went with raid 1, and we needed it that day, so all I could find in town was a generic PCI sata raid card based on, you guessed it, the sucktacular si3112 chipset.
believe it or not, the implementation of the chipset on this card did work. for about a year. btw, they're a pair of maxtor diamondmax 200gb drives...raid 1.
duke power the other day blessed us with a brown out...boss' UPS has been out of commission. brownout wasn't quick enough to make his machine power down, but long enough to make his mach. unstable...so he rebooted. or tried. nothing doing. closest we got was this strange character that resembled a right angle.
yes, duke power took the "redundant" out of his RAID 1 array. not raid 0. Raid 1. neither drive will boot. I've tried everything from reverting back to the mobo's onboard sata controller...nada. "repair windows installation"...gets through the initial install, but can not "pick it back up" after the first reboot when the GUI and mouse support would start to come in. nope...recovery console: fixmbr, fixboot. different error messages, some garbled, some not. one drive now says (upon attempted boot) "missing operating system". other says "error loading operating system".
also tried a second pci sata card from the same manuf w/ the same chipset...no booting.
I've plugged both drives into a different client machine. i beleive both drives are mechanically sound...windows, all boss' data is there...just can't boot.
in the meantime, I've got him back up and running. used norton ghost 2003 to clone one of the 200g drives...(luckily, he had used only about 60g) onto a spare 80g IDE drive of my own. so he's at least off my back about downtime, but I am about ready to throw these drives in the street or shoot them, and he'd kinda like to not lose the investment there.
so please, if you have any advice or suggestions, I'd love to hear them. thanks.
posten
so, when i had to get my boss some new drives to format his machine, we went with raid 1, and we needed it that day, so all I could find in town was a generic PCI sata raid card based on, you guessed it, the sucktacular si3112 chipset.
believe it or not, the implementation of the chipset on this card did work. for about a year. btw, they're a pair of maxtor diamondmax 200gb drives...raid 1.
duke power the other day blessed us with a brown out...boss' UPS has been out of commission. brownout wasn't quick enough to make his machine power down, but long enough to make his mach. unstable...so he rebooted. or tried. nothing doing. closest we got was this strange character that resembled a right angle.
yes, duke power took the "redundant" out of his RAID 1 array. not raid 0. Raid 1. neither drive will boot. I've tried everything from reverting back to the mobo's onboard sata controller...nada. "repair windows installation"...gets through the initial install, but can not "pick it back up" after the first reboot when the GUI and mouse support would start to come in. nope...recovery console: fixmbr, fixboot. different error messages, some garbled, some not. one drive now says (upon attempted boot) "missing operating system". other says "error loading operating system".
also tried a second pci sata card from the same manuf w/ the same chipset...no booting.
I've plugged both drives into a different client machine. i beleive both drives are mechanically sound...windows, all boss' data is there...just can't boot.
in the meantime, I've got him back up and running. used norton ghost 2003 to clone one of the 200g drives...(luckily, he had used only about 60g) onto a spare 80g IDE drive of my own. so he's at least off my back about downtime, but I am about ready to throw these drives in the street or shoot them, and he'd kinda like to not lose the investment there.
so please, if you have any advice or suggestions, I'd love to hear them. thanks.
posten