Sata, serial, via, promise?

I'm soooo confused.  I've been reading the posts and posted myself but it seems I'm more in the dark now than ever.
Ok.  So there's a VIA controller and a Promise controller.  The board has SER1, SER2, SATA1 and SATA2 connectors.  In cmos setup, both are enabled.
I installed one Maxtor drive, connected it to SER1 and used the Promise diskette when prompted at the start of windows setup.  After setup completed I installed all the drivers from the MSI cd.  That was my interpretation of the installation instructions in the manual.
When I boot up, first I get "detecting Promise...."  then it shows my drive.  On the next screen, it reports serial ch0 and ser ch1 as no device detected.  In Windows, device manager shows the Promise controller and the Maxtor as SCSI. My system seems to run fine.
So I went into setup and found both the VIA and the Promise controllers enabled.  I disabled the VIA sata and pata controller.  When booting up, after detecting the Maxtor, I get a blank screen for about 30 seconds after which, windows starts. So I reenabled the VIA.  
On to my questions:
How do I know the promise controller is  functioning?  Simply because the system runs?
Why does the system report ser ch0 and ch1 as no device?
Why the delay during bootup if I disable the VIA controllers?
If I want to try the VIA controller at this point, what do I need to do?
Is the SER1 connector for Promise and the SATA1 for VIA?

Quote
Originally posted by step-dad
[STRIKEOUT]Yippppeeeee [/STRIKEOUT]
I yipppeeeed too soon. I hooked back up my raid and the single sata drive was not recongnized by promise or in windows. I then  did a windows repair so I could load the 378 driver using f6. I still can't get it to work when I use the via raid. However, it is a step in the right direction to just get the thing to work by itself on promise.
I really wish MSI would NOT have used promise on this board.
[STRIKEOUT]After all, it's not brain surgery.[/STRIKEOUT]
Maybe I was wrong.
Glad you got it to work, but sorry it no longer works.  I'm assuming you now have Windows installed on the Via RAID and the Single Promise SATA.  I think there are some issues with installing Windows on separate hard drives that are all connected at the same time.  I think this may be the case since it worked when you had the Via RAID disconnected when you had the single Promise SATA working.  There are problems with which one is recognized as the boot drive during startup.  See if you can force it to boot to the Single Promise SATA by hitting F11 (maybe F12) during start up to choose which drive to boot from.  If you can do this it may be another step in the right direction.  It may also mean that you need to wipe windows off one of the drives  I believe that Jocko has written some great stuff about this type of issue with multiple drives having Windows installed.  Try a forum search for that and maybe something he said could help you out, too.  Let me know if you get it running or if I can be of any further assistance.

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    >
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    160 160 sx8/5 50 57 460 212 9 210 1504 60 1 3724380 3724396
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    Creation Time : Thu Feb 15 22:44:07 2007
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    Array Size : 1465248000 (1397.37 GiB 1500.41 GB)
    Used Dev Size : 293049600 (279.47 GiB 300.08 GB)
    Raid Devices : 6
    Total Devices : 6
    Preferred Minor : 0
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent
    Update Time : Thu Feb 15 22:44:07 2007
    State : clean, degraded, recovering
    Active Devices : 5
    Working Devices : 6
    Failed Devices : 0
    Spare Devices : 1
    Layout : left-symmetric
    Chunk Size : 64K
    Rebuild Status : 0% complete
    UUID : 477c93de:1846baae:2a477155:25972514
    Events : 0.1
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    0 160 1 0 active sync /dev/sx8/0p1
    1 160 33 1 active sync /dev/sx8/1p1
    2 160 65 2 active sync /dev/sx8/2p1
    3 160 97 3 active sync /dev/sx8/3p1
    4 160 129 4 active sync /dev/sx8/4p1
    6 160 161 5 spare rebuilding /dev/sx8/5p1
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    [>....................] recovery = 0.0% (868/293049600) finish=597464.5min speed=3K/sec
    unused devices: <none>
    Last edited by judfilm (2007-02-15 12:51:47)

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    SATA 3 & 4 = Promise RAID controller
    If the test title does not include "RAID", then it was a single drive test.
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    Perhaps some kind reader will OCR the pictures, put them into Excel, and make some nice bar charts for us?
    Hope the info helps.

  • KT6 Delta-FIS2R Serial ATA Question

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