sil3114 sata card

T. Ment wrote:
On Wed, 03 Jul 2019 23:06:34 +0000, T. Ment wrote:

I need it for a DOS computer

The Ebay seller told me it does not support DOS.
Looks like my plan for DOS won't fly.

So back to Ebay for a Promise SATA/150 TX4. It can see the SATA drive,
but wont' use it, until you enter its BIOS and create an array -- which
kills any data on the drive.

I had already cloned the drive using linux DD on another computer which
has onboard SATA, and I didn't want to kill the data and start over. But
at this point I had no other option.

With nothing more to lose, I put the sil3114 back in the P3V4X, booted
from IDE, and ran updflash with BIOS version 5.5.00, the latest one. But
as before, updflash failed, and when rebooting, the computer hung again.
That problem was gone for a while, but it came back. Not sure why.

So back to the USB programmer to reflash. Then the computer booted OK.

Next I booted into the sil3114 BIOS and ran the low level quick format,
hoping to make the sil3114 happy.

I disabled the onboard IDE, then installed DOS 6.22 from floppy to the
SATA drive on the sil3114. Then I enabled IDE, and copied a 40 meg file
from IDE to SATA, all in DOS. That worked too. No errors as before.

Disabled IDE again, booted DOS from SATA. Copied the big file again,
from one directory to another. Very fast. about 1.5 seconds, compared to
10 seconds with the IDE drive and P3V4X bios.

So my conclusion is, you can't clone the drive on some other computer
and expect it to work in DOS with the sil3114. You must make the sil3114
happy by using its low level format first. I don't know what INT13 magic
is going on there, but it seems to work.

I will do more testing after reinstalling the other partitions, but DOS
was the only problem before, so hopefully it will all work.

Even for a JBOD disk (not part of an array),
some RAID cards insist on adding metadata that
says the hard drive is not part of any array.

Some other brands, the firmware looks for metadata. If
is is missing, the drive is assumed to be JBOD.

Not that this has anything to do with a file copy
malfunctioning part way through. That doesn't make
any sense.

Metadata and configurations are things that block
mounting or seeing stuff. For example, if I plugged
an Intel disk into a Promise card, the first
partition would disappear. Plug it back into an
Intel port, the partition comes back. That's an example
of metadata at work, and something which isn't compatible
(or the second controller ate), preventing some info
from being used.

A lot of cards put the metadata at the end of the disk,
but a few put it at the beginning. I suspect my disappearing
partition case, plays into that. (

Paul