Posted 2/2/2009 6:23:13 PM
Since I merged my servers together two weeks ago, my PCI SATA controllers stopped working. They reported that they "could not start" despite having no technical problems and testing reveals they work just fine in kc1.
I reinstalled the drivers, swapped PCI slots, disabled potentially conflicting hardware, and even verified my IRQ assignments manually. Nothing worked. Ultimately, I threw my hands in the air and concluded the OS was too unstable to recognize them anymore. Keep in mind this OS has been installed for three full years (install date: 02/22/2006) and has survived at least two motherboard swaps - Including switching from an old AMD architecture (AMD Athalon 64 X2) to Intel (Intel Core 2 series). It has seen three different CPUs (AMD, Intel dual-core, Intel quad-core) and a dozen different memory configurations. To be honest, I'm suprised it even runs anymore.
Finally, in ultimate defeat, I hoped a newer (or at least a different) SATA controller would do the trick. Looking forward, I purchased a 4-slot Promise SATA300 TX4 card.
The Good: Detected all my drives without needing a reboot (except the downtime for the hardware install, of course); seems relatively fast, and provides twice as many ports as the ones I was using before.
The Bad: It forgot the disk labels to all the drives attached to it - which had me afraid I had lost the data until I opened the volumes and found my data safe and sound.
The Ugly: The CD that comes with it is utterly useless. It doesn't come with a driver - It comes with a utility that will write the driver to a floppy disk! Who even owns a floppy drive anymore? I haven't had one since I got my own CDRW drive a decade ago. You might as well provide an 8" floppy. Fortunately, you can download the driver here. After installing the driver from that site, the card immediately worked properly.
The blog was down for five minutes while I did the install.
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