MSI 890FXA-GD70 and 3Ware 9750-4i BIOS issues

Question

This is my second build with this motherboard.  This post is just to help anyone who might be trying to get similar hardware combinations to work.
The BIOS revision is 1.7, which was the revision the board came with.
When running with a 3Ware 9750-4i board you will find that the 3Ware BIOS will complain about not being able to install.  At first it was complaining about the motherboard BIS not providing enough RAM to live in, but after I set the on-board SATA controller to AHCI is stopped complaining and just didn't show up at all.
Now, don't be discouraged if you aren't booting from the 3Ware controller, because this won't stop it from working.  When the OS loads the driver, everything is fine.
I suspect it would also work if you completely disabled the on-board controller, but that wasn't an option for me.  I wanted to run three additional HDs and two optical drives on that controller, as well as the four drives on the 3Ware.
I kept experimenting with slot positions for the cards, but nothing produced a change at all.
Finally I spent time in the OS trying to make the AHCI drivers for the on-board controller work with connect/disconnect.  There appeared no way in Win7 x64 to get any AHCI drivers to load but the default Microsoft ones, which don't support hot-swap or even connect/disconnect.
It appeared to me that the only AHCI drivers supplied by AMD or MSI specifically work only when the controller is in RAID mode.  So I tried setting the controller to RAID mode in the BIOS, and discovered that it now played nice with the 3Ware BIOS.  Now I am going to reinstall Windows 7 with the 3Ware drivers and select a 3Ware drive to boot from, to see if I can get the AMD or MSI-supplied drivers to work with the on-board controller.  I suspect I will get all the features promised then.  If I don't, I will return here and report the results.

Answer 1

I completed the new install of Win7 - this time with the 3ware controller as the primary, and the on-board SATA set to RAID.
First, I had to load drivers for the on-board RAID during the install, just to let the install continue.  Then I had to load drivers to tell Win7 about the drive where I wanted to install.  I thought it would ask for both up front, but it wouldn't take both - it only wanted the drivers for the controller to which the DVD was connected.  THEN, after it was ready to ask for a location for the install, it let me put the 3ware drivers up.
Once the system was loaded, I was disappointed to find that none of the on-board RAID drives showed up in the add/remove dialog, but I was able to use a utility to make them work with hot-swapping.  It is called Hotswap!
http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm
and it allowed me to connect/disconnect drives plugged into the on-board controller housed in the Thermaltake MAX-2533.
With the settings like that, the BIOS issues disappear, with both the on-board RAID and the 3ware co-existing nicely.  This indicates to me that there is likely something wrong with the standard AHCI BIOS-related screen that makes the 3ware controller unhappy.  I doubt the 3ware is the only BIOS-installing card to feel that way, so if you have your drives set to AHCI, but have issues with any other cards, you might look into setting the drives to RAID or to IDE (though you lose some features like NCQ)
I also forgot to mention that I also have a four-port PCI-Express NIC from Intel in the system, so I have updated the system summary below:
MSI 890FXA-GD70 | AMD Phenom II X6 1090T | ZALMAN CNPS9900MAX-B | CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9B |  HIS Silence H557HR1G Radeon HD 5570 | Antec Solo Black case | Corsair CMPSU-750TXV2 | 3ware LSI00216 (9750-4i) | Intel PRO/1000 PT Quad Port NIC | Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS (x7) | Thermaltake MAX-2533 | Plextor PX-L890SA | Plextor PX-B940SA-11