Sata port not allowing WHS 2011 to boot.

[blctech]

Happy New Year to everyone.

I suddenly have this strange error with my 990X-ud3 mb. Using a 4 core CPU. and 8GB memory. I have 4 drives connected to ports 0 to 3, a HD connected to sata 4 in IDE mode and a DVD connected to sata 5.I have been running it for a few months.

When I rebooted the system after being shutdown for a few days, The bios loaded properly and showed all sata drives connected to the MB on port 0 thru 3. When the operating system (WHS 2011) started to load, the screen stayed blank with just a cursor in the upper left. It would just remain in that state. After 3 hours of debugging and searching I found that when I detached the HD on sata  port 3, the system booted fine. I find now that whenever I connect any HD to port 3, the system will not boot. Ports 4 and work fine and so do ports 0 to 2. BIOS is current.

Is this a Sata port gone bad?


Corsair 750 Watt PS
AMD Phenom II

[blctech]

I tried something else. I have 8 WD Green 2 and 3 TB drives attached to the system, some of the drives are on a Sata card attached to the MB buss. I disconnected 2 HD's from the power supply and the system will boot with a HD attached to the Sata port 3. Ah huh!

I had thought that a 750 PSU would run this system but I was wrong. I ordered a 1050w Corsair from Amazon and we will see what happens.

This was a strange failure of not enough power.

[blctech]

Well I was wrong. Dropped in a new Corsair 1050 power supply. I even ran a separate power cord to that drive on port 3 and guess what. The OS will not boot if the SATA drive connected to port 3 is powered up during boot.

Once I get past the initial boot of the OS and replug the power to that hard drive the drive will come up in the OS. No, it is not the HD and I have tried other HD's in that port to check.

Has anyone ever seen this

[absic]

Hi there,

I have to say that I haven't come across this before and from personal experience it would seem very strange for just one of the SATA ports to fail, although that could well be the case.

It would help if you could post back with your full system spec's including any add-on cards that you have as this would really assist with trying to troubleshoot for you.

[blctech]

Hi

Here are the specs:

Phenom  II X4 970
Bios Award F3

8 GB memory - Kingston HyperX Grey Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory Model KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX
HD's = 10   Boot drive 1 gb - rest 2 and 3 GB drives.

Windows Home Server 2011

HighPoint 2640X4SGL 4-Channel PCI-Express x4 SAS 3Gb/s RAIDController (Qty 2 running in single drive mode - non raid) One Connected to PCIE4 and one connected to PCIE 8

Corsair H80 Water cooling

EverCool Dual 5.25 in. Drive Bay to Triple 3.5 in. HDD Cooling Box (QTY 2) These hold the extra HD's using only 2 5 1/4 slots

[Dark Mantis]

Looking at your specs I would have probably gone for the PSU too although it is a new one on me also. My gut feeling is that it has something to do with the layout of the drives and the fact that there are so many especially "green" versions.

[blctech]

Thanks. What do you mean "something to do with the layout of the drives and the fact that there are so many especially "green" versions" . The "layout" I can understand, but what about the "green drives".


Please note that the two Hightpoint Sata cards in the pcie slots have been in the system for over 3 months with no problems.

When I say that the system will not boot into the OS, in this case WHS 2011, I mean it never gets to the words "Loading Operating System". Only when a powered HD is plugged into port 3 does the board fail to  get to to the words "Loading Operating System". Does this term, "Loading Operating System",  come from the boards Bios or from the OS? I believe from looking at the posts on this site that it comes from the Bios.

Please note also that I can unplug the power from the HD plugged into port 3 and once I get past the"loading operating system" message, I can replug the power to that hard drive the drive will come up in the OS. Kinda clumsy way though to boot a computer.

[blctech]

For those interested, here is tech supports answer:

Dear customer,

Due to chipset and bios desinged up to 6 drives could be connected to mother board, if currently system has other add on card which has more drives connected, you may need to sacrifice one or two controller on mother board to make the other drives functioning. drives address conflicts will cause system sometime boot able sometime not.

Best regards,

Gigabyte technical support team.

I guess I should have stayed with ASUS

[blctech]

When I asked tech support if the GA-990FXA-UD5 has the same limitation as the GA990 xa-ud3 in that will will not support additional drives on pcie cards,

here what they told me:

Dear customer,

If board be able to support up to 10 drives there has no add on PCI card needs, connect drive directly to mother board.

Best regards,

Gigabyte technical support team.


I can't seem to get a straight answer. I want to use more than 10 drives on my system. It is a home server for my movie database. Does anybody know if a Gigabyte MB can use more drives than the amount of sata ports on the MB if you plan to use PCI add on cards? Why is this a big deal?

[brainy]

Hey dude!

I had my problems myself and hopefully I can help you. I used WHS 2011 myself, ports 0-3 I decided to use in raid mode while 4+5 ran in ide mode (a ssd as system disk and a blu ray player). I also plugged in an 3ware raid controller to get 4 more hdds in there. This ended in a strange bios post and a blinkin cursor. So I was fiddling around a bit and got it running in the end - but only with one raid enabled. It seems like the board can't boot with an added raid controller, the onboard ports 0-3 set to raid and ports 4+5 in ide mode. What I did was the following:

I've set all ports (so 0-5) to ahci mode. that allowed me to boot with the 3ware raid enabled. Inside WHS, I used to configure my hdds as raid (WHS supports to set up raid 0, 1 and 5 itself).

So try setting all drives to ahci and give it a go to boot your whs.

Regards

brainy