G1 Assassin 2 Marvell raid w. bios F11 can't config >2Tb + unpredictable issues

[RobD]

Have just discovered that with bios F11, booting uefi/gpt raid > 2tb is no longer possible on the marvell controller. This was working with bios F7.
Any space above 2tb is now lost.

Plus I've never seen a computer that could make so many arbitrary decisions!
To name a few.
1. With a 4 port usb card reader plugged in, the number of drives in bios is sometimes 3, other times 4
2. At F6 raid driver install point, the optical drive is sometimes there, most of the time not when installing over the intel chip.
3. With a 4 port card reader plugged in, at the end of setup [time zone etc.] sometimes setup looks for files in the usb drives, sometimes not.
4. With a 4 port card reader, at F6 raid driver install point, it is totally upredictable as to which drive you will find the flash card on.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

From what you have described it would seem that your problems are down to this 4 port card reader. They often do present issues but I don't know why. I have always put it down to just being poorly manufacturered in general. I installed one a while ago and it blew my motherboard etc. 

[RobD]

Hi DM, yeah I know what you saying, but if you were to get he same correct or incorrect result everytime, that would be fair enough, but to get varying results is a little odd. After all, the system should be following the same execution path every time.

I do have a pattern for No 1. It depends on wether there are any cards in the slots.
As you add cards, the number of drives appearing in bios decreases, probably because the card is seen as not bootable?

I tried a Silverstone FP34 drive bay and the results were the same for 3 and 4.
For No. 4, it started with F drive, then next boot it moved to G, then to E, then to C....seemed to settle on C for a few boots, then went back to G

[RobD]

Have just discovered that with bios F11, booting uefi/gpt raid > 2tb is no longer possible on the marvell controller. This was working with bios F7.
Any space above 2tb is now lost.

It's not clear what the issue is here, but it's nothing to do with the bios version.
I cleared cmos,  booted F7 and set the marvell to raid and was perplexed when I still couldn't partition greater than 2tb   

So I went on to check if  some other issues had been fixed with the new F12a bios and then went back to this issue [still on F12a] and wiped the raid using the marvell utility and created a new raid volume, then decided to delete the raid volume again so I could name it [this step may be important] and noted that it also asked me if I wanted to erase the mbr [this step may be the important one].
I then booted win7 x64 setup and this time it would let me configure more than 2tb.
Will update with the answer if I find it. But for now, be sure to double erase the disks and name the volume [the intel raid assigns a default name which you can change]

[RobD]

Ahh wait, I've been testing just now by simply seeing how much space the create partition tool will allocate to me [more than 2tb] but.. you have to actually do the next step to see what it does create [now only 2tb]....damn....back to the drawing board! 

I can hear C-BuZz shouting at me "Rooobbb....give it up!!!"   

[RobD]

Well, the plot thickens!! The original claim stands that >2tb on marvell raid is no longer possible with bios F11 or F12a
The reason why I was getting inconsistent results with version F7, is to with the way bios looks for bootable drives when the marvell chip is set to raid.

Normally, when you have a fresh drive/s and you start the computer with a bootable windows dvd in the drive, after the bios has finished post it will automatically boot the dvd drive. You will NOT see the message "Press any key to boot cd/dvd", because bios can see that there are no other bootable devices connected.

However, when the drives are connected to the marvell chip and are configured to raid, for some reason bios thinks there is an alternative boot drive besides the dvd and you do see the message "Press any key to boot cd/dvd".
If you ignore that messsage, there is a momentary flash on the screen with text on the left top quoting the bios date and version and on the right top 'press del or f2 to enter setup"

If you allow this to happen, you will find that you cannot partition more than 2tb of the raid volume.
If you DO press a key when you see the boot message and not allow the flash on the screen to happen, you can partition the whole raid volume as a single partition [with the usual small system partitons of course]

However, this is only possible with bios F7, it is not possible to partiton >2tb on the marvell chip with F11 or F12a.
No matter what I do, with F12a I always get a message that windows cannot install to this volume, when you click details it says "The computers hardware may not support booting to this disk,  make sure the device is enabled in bios".

At which bios version this was broken, I don't know. All I know is that F7 works [with attention to boot message] and F11 or F12a don't work
I think this can be elevated to bug status.

[RobD]

However, when the drives are connected to the marvell chip and are configured to raid, for some reason bios thinks there is an alternative boot drive besides the dvd and you do see the message "Press any key to boot cd/dvd".

This only happens with X64 on both intel and marvell chips