EVGA 780i RAID and Silicon Image 3132 RAID Trouble

[JAdamz]

I'm building a new machine with an EVGA 780i motherboard with which I'd like to put 6 hard drives into RAID 5 using the onboard MediaShield RAID. These drives will be used for non-bootable storage as a GPT disk only (I'm using XP 64-bit). In addition, I also installed a Rosewill RC-211 PCI-E SATA add-in card (based on the Silicon Image 3132 chipset) to use another drive as my bootable/OS drive. However, I've encountered a problem that I can't find a solution for!

When I first installed the OS on the single drive (through the SATA add-in card) with the onboard RAID disabled, I was able to boot to Windows without problems. However, once I enabled the onboard RAID and created the RAID array from the 6 drives, the computer would no longer boot the OS ("Disk boot failue, insert system disk"). I'm not sure if this is a problem of conflicting RAID BIOS's or what.

Some things to note: In the system BIOS I have "Bootable Add-in card" set to boot before the onboard RAID 5 array, however this doesn't seem to change anything. Also, when I create the array through the MediaShield RAID menu, I do not select to make it bootable, however when I restart the computer and return to the MediaShield menu it shows up as bootable. I wonder if somehow the array is automatically marking itself as a bootable and that's why it the system is not seeing the single drive with the OS on it?

Anybody have experiences with this combination/suggestions? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Stormrider2000]

I had issues when i first went Raid as well on my 780i, just to say what it turned out to be was i didnt have RAID enabled on 1 of the ports #'s properly. Just a thought.

 

[JAdamz]

Ok, I've been reading up and looking into this some more, and the problem is actually a matter of insufficient OptionROM.

What I didn't mention in my original post was that with both RAID cards (onboard and Silicon Image 3132) enabled, a message would be output after the onboard RAID initialized saying "Have option ROM can not be invoke".

I had to disable several of the integrated peripherals through the BIOS in order to get both the onboard nvRAID and the RAID add-in card to initialize on startup. This includes USB Keyboard and USB Mouse support, as well as both onboard Network controllers (which means I will have to install a dedicated NIC now). I was able to keep the onboard HD audio enabled. Once these peripherals were disabled, both RAID cards were able to initialize.

I'm not sure if the OptionROM issue is something EVGA or nVidia could address in future BIOS revisions, but after reading about several people who have incurred this issue, I believe it would be wise for them to investigate how to remedy this problem without requiring (desired) integrated peripherals to be disabled!