I have an Asus K8V SE deluxe and was wondering if the following
behavior is by design.
If I enable both the SATA on board VIA chip (supports RAID 0,1) and the
Promise PC20378 RAID controller (supports RAID 0,1,0+1) in RAID mode, I
see only the BIOS for the SATA VIA chip (and I can go into its RAID
utility). However, I do not see the Promise BIOS.
I see the Promise BIOS only when:
1) I have the Promise controller in IDE mode and then there's no
possibility for RAID.
2) I disable booting from the SATA VIA chip - but then I can't get into
its BIOS.
Is this by design or should I be able to get into either controller's
BIOS to managae their respective disk arrays?
Thanks,
George
The second posting in this thread, has some info from Tyan tech
support. Basically, there is a memory resource in the first
640K memory area, that limits how many option ROMs can load.
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?threadid=29994&highlight=loading+scsi+bios
"Why doesn't the BIOS (Option ROM) for my PCI device show during
boot up? The cause of the problem is that in order to be PC
Compatible, the Option Rom space is limited to 128K. this is
true for any motherboard with PC compatible BIOS'.
In the common configurations, a newer AGP card (such as any
GeForce4) will require 64K of Option Rom space, so you have only
64K of Option Rom space left to work with for other devices.
Many SCSI , NIC (w/ PXE), IDE Raid and etc., can easily use
another 40 to 64K of Option Rom space for their needs.
By design the Option Rom should shrink down to a smaller run
time code after the initialization code has run. For example,
some Adaptec cards will require 32K to initialize. Then they
shrink down to 12K at run time; whereas some GeForce4 cards require
64K to initialize and never release to a smaller amount. Please
check with the device manufacturer for the latest firmware upgrade
or ask if they have a smaller Option Rom available. Again this
is a limitation of the PC compatible specification and not a
failure of the motherboard BIOS itself."
Do you have some other controller plugged into a PCI slot ?
Can you try a different video card ?
Apparently, on server motherboards, it is common practice
to disable option ROMs on controllers not being used to boot
the computer. An alternate management technique, is to plug the
controller you wish to boot from, into PCI slot 1, as the ROMs
presumably load in the order that PCI controllers are enumerated.
Option ROMs will load, until the space is exhausted.
I find it hard to believe this would be happening on your board,
and don't know if there is any tool that can analyse that
early, boot time problem.
Just a guess,
Paul