My Asus A8N Doesnt boot with Serial ATA drives on Siil Ports

[oow]

Ok I got 3 PCs with Asus A8N SLI Premiun motherboards and they all run flawlessly. However I would like to run one of my harddrives on the RED silicon serial ata ports instead of the BLACK Nforce 4 SATA ports. However no matter what serial ata drive on each of my pcs the boot screen for the silicon drive shows the drive as detected but right under says something like "non valide device" and then once that screen closes the PC refuses to boot. Once I unplug the drive from the PC and soft reset it boots like normal. Anyone know what is going on? I would really like to use these ports but I cannot even get my PC to boot when any serial ata drive is plugged into the serial ata ports of the silicon siil controller. Help guys!

 

[oow]

so noone has tried to use the siil ports of their Asus board?

 

[elmeric]

Hi oow,

Got an a8n sli premium with similar problems. The silicon image seems very buggy. It was also stalling after the "non valid device" and the enumeration of the PCI devices. To make it boot with the drives on the SI controller, get in the bios with F4 then create a rad group lets set JBOD, then reboot. I did that with a raid 5 group based on 3 disks. Of course, the logical disk, which should be reported on the right pane is not but at list that passes by and the system boot.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to use the raid disk wiithin windows. Getting a lot of errors reported with the raid4software. I have upgraded to the latest version 1.2.3.1 for the drivers and 1.0.1.2 for the software but to no avail. I will be posting on several bbs today and on the asus site but I am not hoping much. I also have a small 2 ports raid 0/1 card from siig (cheap) and when the silicon controler is enabled, can not even recognize the disks attached to this controller.

This controller is quite a disaster. I wonder if ASUS did its assurance quality job here. The silicon image bios is full of typos, the logical drives is not properly reported. One can create 10 raid5 with the same disk without a report of problems. well, I am very disappointed so far as I had bought this motherboard to use the extra controller.

Hope to get some feedback from people with similar problems

 

[oow]

well I dont know how to set JBOD as I am only trying to use one drive and I do not see any option for setting JBOD in the bios when I press Ctrl+S, thanks for replying, could u explain further how I set JBOD as I am not trying to do RAID or anything, I jsut want to use my drives on those ports as regular serial ata

 

[wanderer27]

You have two groups of SATA Ports on your MB - one set with Black Plugins and on the other with Red.

One set I believe is primarily just for RAID configuration (NVRAID controller) and are labeled RAIDx (x is a number) on the MB.

The other set is on the Silicon controller. Here's the confusing part, if you're not going to use RAID on these, just turn this off (disable) in BIOS. It'll be in the same menu as the NVRAID controller which I'd also disable.

Your SATA will work fine on these Ports as the actual normal SATA function control is under the IDE/Hard Drive Menu, so in the above you just turned off the RAID function (which you're not using).

With RAID enabled and the Silicon Drivers installed, I believe you will have the issues you mentioned if you're not running RAID.

 

[oow]

thanks ALOT! wow, its not very intuitive is it? I thought disabling that would disable those ports completely. I guess thats why it was giving those errors because it expected to see pairs of drives right? Again thanks!

 

[wanderer27]

Glad to help - hope this keeps your problems at bay

 

[oow]

hmm, ok when I disable it in the bios then where are the drives that it detects listed in the bios. Also once I boot to windows I do not see any of the drives that I plugged into the red serial ports.