SAS Controller Problems

Cheers for that mike i'll give it ago when i get home, just one thing do you still these days have have to F6 and install third party drivers?

Assuming you do have the cards S/W CD just read the install instructions from the link I sent you and all will become clear. If no driver CD then you need to go to the supermicro site to download the drivers. In short F6 is needed but as the manual says you have to be quick. Good luck.

Ahhhh still no go this is now burning my head out, First i removed the drivers that where already installed then shut down the pc removed the card rebooted then I followed these part of the destruction from the SuperMicro's User Manual

3-2 Adding the Driver into an Existing System
Use the following procedures for adding a driver into an existing system.
For the Windows Operating System:

1. Install the controller and make sure that the BIOS screen is displayed.

2. Start the Windows OS. The Windows OS displays the FOUND NEW HARDWARE
WIZARD window and searches for the installer driver.

3. Insert the driver floppy disk that you've created into the floppy drive, select the
floppy drive as the source, and press the ENTER key.

4. Continue clicking NEXT until the driver is successfully installed.

5. Remove the driver disk from the floppy disk drive and restart the system to complete
the installation process.

From your reply it appears that although you removed the card etc. you then rebooted without putting the card back in. If so the the system cannot see it as it is no longer there and therefore won't ask for a driver because as far as it is concerned there is nothing asking for a driver.

Shut down, put the card back in and restart from 1 again. Re-read what it says about F6 as it is sometimes fiddly to get to get the screen you need as the F key serves 2 functions. i have similar problems when I need to access my SAS controller BIOS (an LSI Logic Megaraid 8 port controller) running with Win 7 Enterprise.

Any piece of hardware that asks for floppy disk is as a rule of thumb outdated.

miket82 said:

From your reply it appears that although you removed the card etc. you then rebooted without putting the card back in. If so the the system cannot see it as it is no longer there and therefore won't ask for a driver because as far as it is concerned there is nothing asking for a driver.

Sorry mike think you misunderstood i did that first just to make sure there was no trace of the card left over then shut down pc put the card in and carried on as normal to installing the driver as to the manual instructions, anyway nothing seems to fix this issue even put the old ssd drive back in which was untouched (still the way i took it out when everything was working) but same problem after post just sits at a black screen for a while then pops up the message press any key to boot from floppy. Think going with a new SAS card i might have better results?

Whilst I agree with gregrocker that RAID is being replaced by other procedures/technologies few home users could afford or have the understanding to. go down those routes. The question is how the wints problem can be solved within a reasonable budget.

Q1. Is there data on the sas drives which needs to be accessed
or
Q2 is the object to simply use them because they are available and/or the extra space is required.

If the former then wints needs a solution using the existing H/W

If the second, then, assuming the drives themselves are OK there are 3 possible solutions

1 Obtain a different controller and try again

2 Sell the drives and use the proceeds to contribute to the cost of purchasing bigger capacity sata drives, substitute these for the existing smaller drives and then sell those on. No mention of eSata but that is what I would use to transfer the contents from small to big before I replaced the small for the bigger drives. (eSata card plus cable from eBay under a tenner).

3 Sell the sas drives and abandon the idea.

Thanks for the replys guys biggest problem is that there data on the sas drives which needs to be accessed say like a third of my movies which I really wouldn't like to re-rip

Was your previous install to EFI? Was SATA set to AHCI? Why was the hardware raid being run on it if this was not even known? Was it the factory install?

I am not a raid expert but even though Hardware raid should be independent of the installed OS an EFI BIOS might still affect the card. I would contact the cards tech-support to ask about the correct settings, or post back a picture so someone more familiar with raid can assist you.

Still waiting to hear what card drivers or patches the new install delivers when you enable hardware updating and run Windows update. Uninstall all the old drivers in Control Panel and Device manager first.