Raid card will not boot with drive installed

[boat27]

I installed a Rosewell RC-217 Raid card (Silicon Image Sil 3124 SoftRaid 5 Controller-- in Device Manager). The card installed well in Windows 7 64 bit. No problems in device manager.

The problem starts when i plug the drive in then rebooted. The boot stops at the 'Starting Window' and hangs.

If i boot into windows then plug the drive in all work well. Windows sees the drive and i gave it a drive letter. works great.

Problem is i can't boot my system without un-pluging the drive.

Any ideas????

 

[boat27]

Anybody out there

wondering if anybody could help?

 

[dpphotos]

Did you ever solve this? I'm having the same issue - Windows 7 Ultimate - Sil 3124 and 3132 installed with 2 x Sans Digital JBOD enclosures. I have to power the enclosures off to get Windows to start up, otherwise it hangs at 'Starting Windows' as above.

 

[dpphotos]

Anyone else come across this?

 

[slipdipidis]

Possible Driver incompatibility

So I too am having this issue. I believe it has something to do with Intel's RAID management driver and the Silicon Image driver I just installed. I too have an x64 CPU running Seven x64 Enterprise. I used the 3124 on the last computer (Optiplex 755 with XPx64), no issues there. I turned off driver signing and for a little while it seemed to help, but then after a recent restart... frozen at the Windows Flag. Trying to see if playing with the driver combinations helps and will post the solution here soon. The problem with Silicon Image is that they manufacture cheap products and cheapo product manufacturers never hire talented driver writers... they can't afford to sell their stuff if they pay for good talent... the upside is that most of the time the product will work. If it doesn't, like we see here... fat chance getting anyone to fix and re-release the driver. Let me see what I can do.

 

[slipdipidis]

Still working on it

I've changed the HDD controller method in the BIOS to Legacy... this disabled the Intel Management Engine which I thought might have been conflicting with The SI3124 drivers. It was not the issue and W7 still hangs at the glowing flag. I'm going to see if they make a different driver for this controller... or get a new controller, but I'm afraid to lose all the photo archives and family movies I have by needing a rebuild on the new controller. Let's see what else I can figure out.

 

[MAP]

I am having the same problem on Asus P8Z68 motherboard Win 7 pro and a SiI3124 generic PCI SATA card. It hangs just after post with a message 'boot loader missing' (I do not need or use a boot loader...). More specifiably the system hangs only when there is a drive connected to the SiI BUT boots fine when no drives are connected (yet SiI card is installed). However the drives are accessible if they are connected hot to the SiI card after boot. (no raid)

I have tried the latest bios and drivers downloaded from the SiI website.