I tried googling some information and it seems the bios on the card can be flashed from 3112 to 3152. I'm not sure if that makes a difference. What I can find is that the 3152 can handle 4 devices and the 3112 2? The card itself is only a 2-port.

The 3112 and 3512 are 2-port controllers, and in terms of software and BIOSes, they're interchangeable... the 3512 is basically just a revised 3112, in a physically smaller chip with PCI 2.3 support. It's the 3114 that's 4-port.

What sort of drives are you trying to hook to it, and do you have any idea what BIOS version it is?

Is that in your AX59Pro?

The one drive I can remember specifically is a Western Digital WD2000, 200gig drive. I used gparted in linux to give it a 60gig partition, fat32 before putting it into this box.

The motherboard is actually the Acer V30, as my ax59pro has some issues right now. Would actually prefer to use that board but I need to figure out what's going on with it first.

If it is a SATA-II drive, try setting the jumper to force it into SATA-I mode. Many of the early SATA controllers are quirky to say the least.

The manual for the drive doesn't list a jumper option for that...

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/se … _id/1341#jumper

"OPT1" is what you want to jumper.

Beautiful. I'll try it when I get home.

Well, I'm now completely lost. I tried every single different jumper config and it still won't see the drive if i try to go into the utility. If I just leave it alone, it'll display the Silicon Image 3152A ver blah blah hit ctrl+s or F4 to enter utility...but it won't show the drives connected and will just skip to the rest of the boot procedure.

Any help? It'd be nice to actually use this machine at some point. 🙁

senrew wrote:

Well, I'm now completely lost. I tried every single different jumper config and it still won't see the drive if i try to go into the utility. If I just leave it alone, it'll display the Silicon Image 3152A ver blah blah hit ctrl+s or F4 to enter utility...but it won't show the drives connected and will just skip to the rest of the boot procedure.

Any help? It'd be nice to actually use this machine at some point. 🙁

Upgrade its BIOS. I had issues with an onboard 3112a that wouldn't move from the drive info screen unless I flashed it to the latest bios available

I got this card to boot DOS 6.20(2.5Gb IDE disk via IDE-SATA adapter!), and even QEMM and DOOM2 seems to be working fine with it(some cards/models create issues with these programs, while booting looks ok):
http://www.ebay.com/itm/251237464717

It is a "SiI3114CTU" chip, SATAraid (not SATAlink), though it might be possible to downgrade the bios to a 'basic' nonraid SATAlink card (?).
Card production date from January 2013 it seems. Only tested port 3 so far.

As for your current card, the bios upgrade suggestion might help, though never tried this myself.

* * *

This card did not work for me, but for someone else on Vogons it apparantly did:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/330632518665
(maybe different bios?)

This card worked, as in the first one I bought that is - second identical one did not(its bios displayed the found drive info, then regular POST boot process finished normally but as if there were no drive - i.e. ending in a normal POST error message). Not sure why (tested in identical setup):
http://www.ebay.com/itm/160367707372

The BIOS line comes up as Silicon Image 3152a SATARaid v 4.3.34 (Something like that, it's in the other room and I'm kinda tired of looking at that machine right now)
The actual chip on the card says SATALink 3112a.

The card is silk screened with SATA 3 Ports, but only has 2 physical ports on the back edge.

bestemor wrote:

This card did not work for me, but for someone else on Vogons it apparantly did:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/330632518665
(maybe different bios?)

This is actually the auction I bought the card from.

I've found a bunch of different bios images on the silicon image site but I have no idea where to start with this. Do I want to flash it back to 3112a and keep it as it was, or keep it 3152a or...I have no clue where to start.

That's pretty much what I have...

I plugged in two notebook drives (250GB and 320GB) and a desktop drive (640GB). They show up during POST and you can also see the drives in the controllers BIOS (I believe you press F4).

Ok, that looks like it did it. I found the latest 3112a BIOS, 4.4.02 off of the silicon image site, along with the latest dos flash updater. Flashed, rebooted, and BAM, it picks up the drive on POST.

Now I just need to figure out how to partition this thing with Mau's super fdisk steps and I should be good. The machine can't boot from CD so I'll find a work around.

Got the thing partitioned, was able to copy over a system to it. However, on reboot, it just hung at the point where the boot drive would start...booting. Not sure if this has anything to do with the card not being bootable with this machine or what.

The motherboard is an Acer v30. I'm sure it could use a BIOS update, but again, I'm stuck.

I recommend a 30GB FAT32 partition as max. There are issues with some utilities and partitions larger than 32GB.

After partitioning with SFDISK, I reboot with a W98B disk and format C: /s

After this the drive should boot.

All this talk about bioses made me try looking for SiI 0680A bioses, but nothing on that model is present on the siliconimage website, even if they claim that:

64-bit Windows drivers are downloadable from Support page for the Sil 0680A, Sil 3x12, Sil 3114, Sil 3124 and Sil 3132 controllers. WHQL certified versions can also be installed on Internet-connected Windows PCs by using the option in the driver update and installation wizard to search the Internet (aka Microsoft's server) for the logo'ed driver.

Drivers for some discontinued products and no-longer supported operating systems may still be available in the Knowledge Base accessible from the left pane of the support web pages.

Probably me or my ancient browser, but unable to see any 'Knowledge base' either.

Googling gives mixed results... so, anyone know of a 'safe' place for those bioses?
FTP ?

I guess I'd be looking for both a 'recent' BASIC/IDE nonraid bios and a RAID bios, + update program(or perhaps the one for 3112 etc can be used for this older bios?). And drivers as well, if available.

PS: @senrew: were you able to actually make the disk boot with that card after the bios update and disk formatting etc?

Actually, no. I redid the partition at 30gb like Mau suggested. I originally had it at 60gb as per his video. It still won't boot.

Steps:
1) super fdisk
2) format /q /u /s
3) copy files from virtual a: created from the win98 boot cd as per Mau's video
4) edit config.sys and autoexec.bat as needed
5) reboot

The machine will go through post until the point where it'll try to boot from a drive but then just sit there. It'll boot from a floppy just fine if present, but nothing from the hard drive. It doesn't put up the no disk found or bad system disk messages, so not sure what the problem is.

Try changing the boot order to firstly C only and then SCSI.

On my machines it will boot with C only. But if an IDE drive is connected as well it will boot from that first. SCSI forces to boot from non-IDE drives.

After formatting with format C: /s try booting straight away, don't copy anything over yet.

The only options in BIOS are A, C, A then C, or C then A.

Still haven't found an updated bios for the motherboard so not sure if that would help.