Windows 7: PCI-E Sata Card not detected and not working

Hello, right heres my problem

I built my own computer, got a raid array, around 12 HDD/SSD's, and since i have so many drives i needed to buy a sata controller to get extra sata ports at 6GBPS, so i brought:

StarTech.com 4 Port PCI Express SATA III
4 Port PCI Express SATA III (6Gbps) Controller Card w/ eSATA - PCIe x4
PEXSAT34
NEW StarTech.com 4 Port PCI Express SATA III (6Gbps) Controller Card w/ eSATA -
PCI Express SATA 6Gbps Card - 4-Port PCIe (x4) SATA 3.0 Card | StarTech.com Global
NEW StarTech.com 4 Port PCI Express SATA III (6Gbps) Controller Card w/ eSATA - | eBay
£78.60

my motherboard:
Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H

may be irrelevant but heres the rest:
AMD Phenom II X6 1090t Black Edition 64 Bit
Spire Thermax Eclipse II (SP984B1-V2) Heatsink
Corsair DOMINATOR GT 2GB DDR3 SDRAM Memory Module x 4 = 8Gb
Thermaltake Toughpower 1500 Wattage
Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Terabyte 7200.11 x 3 = 4.5TB
Sapphire Ati Amd Radeon HD 6970
Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio



so anyway, my current drive connections, this is the numbering as it would appear logically in information on the pc

---------------
| 0 | 2 | 4 | 6 |
---------------
| 1 | 3 | 5 | 7 |
----------------------------------

INFORMATION OF MY MOTHERBOARDS SATA PORTS

0 - 5 are blue ports that are SATA 3 6Gbps, which are controlled by ICH10R southbridge and support RAID 0/1/5/10

6 - 7 are white ones that are GSATA 2 3Gbps, which are controlled by two JMicron 322 storage processors and support RAID 0/1/JBOD

sata port drive model letter and name assinged
0: OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS Edition SATA III SSD 240GB first brought one on 15/01/2012 for £336.00 RAID 0 c: 1 programs 1, d: 1 programs 1 system reserved
1: OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS Edition SATA III SSD 240GB brought another one on 06/08/2012 for £147.97 RAID 0
2: Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Terabyte 7200.11
3: Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Terabyte 7200.11
4: Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Terabyte 7200.11
5: Seagate Barracuda ST2000DL003 Green 3.5-inch 2TB SATA 6 Gb/s Drive
6: Seagate Barracuda 250gb
7: DVD RW Drive

a: Floppy Disk Drive
e: 2 documents 6 USED TO BE CALLED "programs 2 backup" Seagate Barracuda 250gb 5200rpm, from external hdd i found in uni
k: 8 documents 7 320gb from mums old pc
old programs hdd with bad sectors, Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Terabyte 7200.11 £43.00

atm disconnected drives:
Seagate 3TB 3.5 inch 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA3 Hard Drive
and a few more




so thats that, so i brought the sata controller, connected it to the bottom blue 16x slot, but its states its fine its backwards compatible to 4x

but from this point on i never got the new drives connected to the sata ports to appear, only like once did they appear in the bios hdd boot order, but even the boot order wasnt manageble once i connected the sata card, alot of things went wrong, but all fixeable back to the initial point before sata card connected by resetting CMOS and resetting up the bios for my old RAID setup, so heres all the notes i made on the things that went wrong, and everything i have tried:







ALL THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS AFTER THE SATA CONTROLLER CARD IS CONNECTED

cant access hdd boot order

when all my hdd drives are connected to motherboard sata ports, everything is fine all settings and options are there, however when i connect a pci sata controller with 2 hdds plugged into it, into the pci motherboard slot, and boot up the pc, and go into the bios, many options are missing, for example "advaced bios features > hard disk boot priority" if i disconnect the hard disk drives from the sata controller windows boots up from the motherboard sata ports, and the bios is normal with all the options including hard disk boot priority works fine in the top blue pci-e port where the graphics card was, so ill swap the gpu slot nope, it only booted up into os because the sata controller card wasnt detected for some reason


bios > del > advanced bios features > full screen logo show > disabled
bios > del > CTRL+F1, it showed hidden option, like advanced chipset features, still no boot priority thought


the fourth screen at my pc boot up shows:
marvel adapter 88se91xx
pass thru ahci
which im assuming is the sata cards raid controller, or ide controller, or its bios itself? since this sata card is supposed to have a bios in it
and theres a fifth that says marvel as well which im assuming is another controller of that sata card

my motherboard has dual bios, but that cannot be the problem, its only when the sata card is connected that the bios goes weird, most likely because the bios that im accessing is the sata cards bios

so since i cannot access boot order, when i try to let windows boot up, it gets stuck on the windows welcome screen, most likely because its running one of the broken operating systems on one of the harddrives that i dont want the OS booting off

disconnected the sata card, booted up to windows, installed the drivers/program, that the cd it came with, even thought the manual says windows 7 doesnt require it since it has native drivers built into OS

if i remove the GPU from the top blue 16x slot, and keep the sata card in the bottom blue 16x slot, the card's controller screen doesnt even show up, meaning its not recognised

connected the gpu back in the top blue slot, and sata controller in bottom blue slot, and connected my OS raid array into sata card, didnt boot up, crashed on windows starting screen, most likely because of the raid setup, maybe raid isnt enabled on the card, or different programing for raid as its a different controller (marvell)

so skipping the driver/progra/software, installation, as apparently it isnt necessary, back to same configuration, gpu in top blue, sata controller in other blue pci, non os hdds connected to sata controller pci card, trying to boot to windows install disc, stuck on the blinking, underscore cursor, few reboots later i pressed f12 to access boot menu, when i did, it froze on there for some reason, after researching about being stuck on the blinking cursor and boot menu stuck, apparently i needed to reset CMOS, so i removed sata card and cmos battery for like 5 minutes, kept pressting f12 to try and access boot menu, it worked and didnt freeze now, instead of blinking underscore it said "loading operating system" when onboard set to native ide, checked boot priority, at this point the hdds connected to the sata card appeared in the boot priority list but the raid array drives were appearing seperately, re setup my bios settings to what they were before to enable my raid array once again, rebooted, now the menus were all weird, again, options missing, boot priority missing, but the raid array is now setup even thought we cannot see it, also after setting up raid the drives connected to the sata card appear in the marvel controller screen, whilst they dont appear in the marvel screen when raid isnt configured, even though those drives arent setup as raid, but on raid it freezes on the blinking underscore

disconnected sata card, reset cmos, reset raid configurations, boots up to windows fine, connected sata card with drives connected to it, boots to wrong drive, and no boot priority and missing bios options again, with drives disconnected and sata card connected, all bios are there including boot priority, but since drives are disconnected they arent appearing there, connected one drive to the sata port, bios still exact same, and the sata card and the drive its connected to, comes up at boot screens, however the sata card drive doesnt appear at boot priority, rebooted it to try to boot to windows, stuck on blinking underscore again, tried boot priority again, still drive doesnt appear there, i guess this is controlled somewhere else completely, boot menu worked thought (f12), and got to launch OS raid array, same as before, stuck after "starting windows" with a static cursor and black screen

test: put sata card in top blue port, without drives, clear cmos, reset raid and boot priority, boot to windows, attach one new hdd to sata card, adjust boot priority, boot to windows
result: pci sata card not detected no matter what

test: disconnect sata card, gpu card, reset cmos, connect gpu card in top blue port, connect sata pci to bottom blue port without any drives connected to it, setup bios and raid and boot priority, boot to windows, install marvell utility and drivers from the latest download
results: cant boot to windows, stuck on starting windows, boots to safe mode straight away, installed those exes again, back to trying to boot to normal mode again, stuck on starting windows, tried to launch windows install disk via boot, f12, then cdrom, didnt work just went into launching windows, tried again, noticed that at the very bottom of the list there was "atapi dvd" which was my cd rom, used that, it launched install disc, now ill try startup repair, then fixboot and those things, if cd boot still dont work, go to bios, disable second and third boot devices, only leave ATAPI DVD A, and not CD ROM, still same, bios ignoring boot sequence i believe, cleared cmos, left gpu disconnected, setup raid, boot sequence, booted to windows fine, this time sata card not detected, even thought its in the bottom blue slot, so i think it works like this, if gpu is not in one of the blue slots but the sata card is, then the sata card doesnt get detected, nope still same, gpu in bottom blue, and sata card in top blue, still not detected

test: remove all pci cards, remove cmos battery, plugged it back in 10 minutes later, connected pci sata with hdds in the top and bottom sata port pointing the open side of the case, and the sata card in bottom blue pcie
result: still not detected




so i was starting to give up, so i went onto messeging the seller on ebay:

Hey, right, i duno if the product you sent me is broken or what, but everything should be compatible, i got windows 7 64 bit ultimate, pci slot im plugging it into is blue pcie x 16 but card is x4 but thats fine in compatibility, anyway, ive included my trouble shooting log to prove that i do know what im doing, i have 11 hdds and ive run out of sata ports on my MOBO so i brought this to extend my sata ports

basically i brought StarTech.com 4 Port PCI Express SATA III (6Gbps) Controller Card w/ eSATA

but no matter what i do i cannot get it to work

everything should be compatible, i got windows 7 64 bit ultimate, pci slot im plugging it into is blue pcie x 16 but card is x4 but thats fine in compatibility, i have 11 hdds and ive run out of sata ports on my MOBO so i brought this to extend my sata ports, heres my trouble shooting log i made:

So they decided to refund me and i brought another one, i thought maybe its broken



Received replacement, everything is still exactly the same, so i contacted the manufacturers and support website with same question, heres their responce:


Dear Tomas,

If the device is not seen in your systems device manager it means your computer does not physically see the card is inserted.

If you cannot change the settings for your PCI-E slots i would recommend attempting a BIOS update on this system.

If a BIOS update does not allow you to detect the card within device manager i would test the card installed in a different model computer system.

If your issue replicates your product may be defective.

If you are within 30 days of purchase you can contact our reseller for an exchange. if you are outside of 30 days but still within the units warranty time frame, you can submit the product for RMA using our online RMA form located here: www.StarTech.com/RMAform at which point our RMA team will be able to assist you with your exchange.


Have you tried your card in a different PCI-E slot?

Have you investigated your systems BIOS to see if you need to configure that 16x slot to work in a 4x mode?

Does the device detect in your systems device manager?

Have you attempted installing the latest drivers/downloads located on our website here: http://sgcdn.startech.com/005329/med...l_88SE9128.zip ?




since these suggestions, i updated the bios, no difference at all, the only thing i have left to try is, going into device manager, uninstalling all storage controllers, try the card in another computer on a different motherboard, or get a refund for this model and buy a different sata card, not same model

I would be curious to know what are you doing with so much HDDs.

Let's see if we can sort this out. First and foremost, a link
Your sata card manuals, drivers and utilities Download the manual and read it, it's pretty short. Now, page 4 says how to check if the drivers were installed correctly (they say Windows 7 has already the drivers and doesn't need installation, but let's check anyway), do it and report back.

There is also an utility in the page above, which you can try installing to see if you can get a bit more control over the card.

Another possible issue is power, although with a 1500 watt PSU... anyway, fill your specs in this calculator so we are sure that is not the issue.

This is failing at worst or unreliable at best, suggest to move away data and put it to rest. Don't use it atm to troubleshoot the card.

Those names identify that card's chipset, so it's the card talking to you.
Look if it states a key to press to open a bios-like window where adjust the card's settings.
Theoretically it should, or at least a few I had did (different model different brand, but hey, it's a sata card, not a spaceship). Mine worked with pressing Tab, but I had to take a camera and take pics of the screen during boot as it was too damn fast to be readable.

Yes, that card is just a sata card, has no RAID functions.

What about formatting those drives before trying again? It's one less thing interfering. just disconnect some of the drives you have already (or the DVD drive) and connect them in their place. leave the card out of the slot as you want to be sure your mobo's bios is booting from the right drive.