John, I've flipped every bit that I can think of. There is no way to get the VIA SATA off of RAID except for not creating raid. I can only enable or disable the sata feature on the mobo bios. I'm going to do this and put in an IDE drive to get the thing up. I apologize if you were under the impression that this is an MSI board, It is the DFI K8M800-MLVF. Thanks for the help. Frank John D. Jegla wrote:
Hi Frank,
Is this what you are saying:
- you have DISabled all IDE controllers in BIOS (except maybe for a CD drive) - you have ENabled all SATA controllers in BIOS - you have NOT built a RAID array using the VIA BIOS utility (or deleted any one that you created previously) - you see no option to set a SATA device as the first boot device -> the system won't boot without a bootable floppy or cd?
If all of the above are true, then I think you are SOL - I've looked at the manual for this board and I don't see anything about booting SATA. I suppose you could call MSI and ask them - this is probably your last hope... :(
I'd hate to suggest that you give up on your MSI board. If you want to, I can't recommend any Raid separate controller card - I have no experience with them - I would suggest googling. In any event, you wouldn't want a Raid controller card, but just a disk controller card, since we're talking Linux software Raid here. But a separate card would make the bootable device situation even hairier, I suspect.
The motherboard I am using (with great success in the SATA and Raid arenas with Suse 9.3) is the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe. This board has IDE (2 controllers for a total of 4 devices) and SATA (two separate Raid-compatible controllers for a total of 8 devices). The BIOS lets me assign type (ATA, Raid, etc.) to all SATA drives and lets me assign boot order from amongst all drives, IDE or SATA - does your motherboard not let you do this latter setting? It is crucial for me as I have no IDE drives, only SATA (I know, I shouldn't really say "IDE", I should say "PATA", but I'm lazy and I suspect you'll know what I mean anyway :). This particular board was pretty expensive 4 months ago because it supports NVidia SLI graphics which was all the rage then - its probably cheaper now. Note that I had NO luck using SATA optical devices with this board UNTIL Suse 9.3 (but I believe this was a known issue with 9.2) - now my Plextor SATA DVD writer works fine.
On Tuesday 19 July 2005 10:38 pm, Frank L. Parks wrote:
DFI K8M800-MLVF