I'm using a ECS KBN-I/2100 (dual core Kabini) along with an ASMedia 1061 PCIe SATA card. The system is running Windows Home Server 2011 on a OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD. With just the SSD plugged in the system boots up just fine. However, as soon as I plug any hard drives into the PCIe SATA card, and boot up, the system detects the PCI card and the hard drives, but I get a blue screen as soon as windows tries to load. If I plug either of the hard drives into the board itself, it boots up without issue. Anyone have any ideas?
does windows boot up with the sata card in but without drives on the sata card? I had a similar problem once (don't recall hardware now) and I had to set a lower sata mode on the hard drives with a firmware flash.
Could it be an ahci, Ide, raid setting error in windows? I know there is a Reg hack for windows 7 and in windows 8 you can just boot safe mode and it will reinstall it depending on bios setting, I reckon home server 2011 has something similar Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4
Yes, boots up with the SATA card in, but as soon as I connect the drives it won't boot. Jeebus. I hope I don't have to start firmware flashing hard drives (they are WD Red 3TBs by the way) I don't think so, I've set it to boot from the SSD in the BIOS and disabled every other option. Yes, its definitely that kind of error, but I installed it with AHCI selected, and its still set to AHCI now. I'll definitely give booting in safe mode with the drives attached a go!
Might be worth researching if there is any kind of firmware update for the PCIe card, and also for your motherboard. Also do you have any other sata drives you could hookup and test? to see whether it is your specific drives causing the issue.
For the pcie card, my best guess is that it's the f/w on here (naturally the Asmedia ASM 106x SATA Controller Sata6G one in the 3rd box down)... ...which suggests that the latest f/w was in November. Now it 'may' be the case that they've been set up for updating a chip that's on a motherboard, so it'd be worth checking first whether there's an update option in either the 'properties' pop-up from right-clicking the device in device manager in Windows &/or any management s/w that the thing came with. Whilst with proper raid cards it's normally the later, i've had a couple of cheap cards where it's the former. There's also, obviously, recent drivers on that site which may also help.
So, I flashed the mobo with a new BIOS - didn't make any difference. I've got the latest firmware for the PCIe card, but I can't work out how to flash the .rom file onto the card. Anyone know?
Have you tried putting the HDD's on the mobo and plugging the SSD into the controller? Also, if you're feeling ballsy, you could try hot plugging the drives after windows loads.
