No disks connected to Fastrak Controller

Discussion in 'Tech Support' started by Fippy, 18 Jul 2006.

  1. Fippy

    Fippy What's a Dremel?

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    I am getting this error message all of a sudden on a machine that has been happily running for over a year. :(
    Let me summarise my setup:

    AMD Athlon 64 3200+ in an Asus A8V Deluxe m/b. I have 2 (256G) Hitachi Deskstar SATA drives - RAID 1, and a 40G Hitachi IDE drive, plus a couple of optical drives and a 550W PSU. I'm running WinXP Pro and the RAIDed SATA drives are the boot drives. I'm running them on the VIA VT controller, which I believe is the Fastrak controller?

    Here's my BIOS settings:
    On Chip SATA Boot ROM: enabled
    Onboard Promise Controller: enabled
    Mode: RAID mode

    It has been working just great for over a year. I restarted it yesterday and now I get "No disks connected to Fastrak controller. The BIOS is not installed" every time I try to boot. :( After the BIOS screen on bottup, it correctly identifies that there are 2 RAID drives and obtains their serial number/id correctly but then the Fastrak Controller goes on to "Scanning IDE Drives" and then I get the error message. In the BIOS setup it only identifies my little IDE hard drive. If I boot from the SATA Drive utility CD, it correctly identifies the drives, capacity, serial numbers etc.. and has them flagged as bootable.

    I'm assuming that it is not driver versions, BIOS updates or anything s/w related since I didn't change any s/w configurations prior to it breaking. The only clue I have is that over the last couple of weeks the system has rebooted a couple of times from heat, rebooting at a CPU temp of 118. Phew! generally it runs around 100-111.

    Can anyone help with this please? have I burned out my controller perhaps?
    Thanks a lot!

    Can anyone help me with this please?
     
  2. DougEdey

    DougEdey I pwn all your storage

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    This is a standard query we have on here all the time.

    The Asus *8V (A8 and K8) both have 2 separate controllers, one VIA one FastTrak. Go into the BIOS and you will see a "Disable Fastrak controller" option. Just disable the fastrack and you will be fine.
     
  3. Fippy

    Fippy What's a Dremel?

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    I don't recall seeing any mention of Fastrak in the BIOS. Where exactly is it?

    The point is, why work for a year and then go wrong? Most posts I have seen of this nature are people setting their machines up for the first time.
     
  4. DougEdey

    DougEdey I pwn all your storage

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    Your BIOS may have been reset due to a low powered CMOS battery
     
  5. Fippy

    Fippy What's a Dremel?

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    Good point. My other BIOS settings seemed ok. I'll look for that option you mentioned tonight at home, but I don't ever recall seeing Fastrak mentioned in my AMI BIOS.
     
  6. DougEdey

    DougEdey I pwn all your storage

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    It may be referred to as something else, such as Promise
     
  7. Fippy

    Fippy What's a Dremel?

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    I turned off the Promise option in tghe BIOS and it made no difference.
    Actually I don't understand your suggestion... there are 2 SATA controllers, Promise and VIA, right? I had my drives wired up to the Promise sockets on the m/b. So turning off Promise in the BIOS is not going to help.

    So I moved my drives to the other sockets, the VIA ones. With Promise turned ON, Promise reported that there was no array detected and did I want to create one. That makes sense. With Promise turned OFF (i.e. using VIA) it still didn't boot, but of course Promise didn't report a problem.

    Having verified that my drives are connected to the Promise sockets on the m/b it appears that I definitely need Promised ON in the BIOS. So what happened? Is there a utility for verifying the status of a RAID drive? My Hitachi RAID utility gathers info about the drive that looks good, but it doesn't mean that the drives haven't gone bad. For both RAID drives to go down is a bit unlikely to me though.

    Do you have any other ideas, Doug, or anyone? Any diagnostics? I appreciate your help.
    Thanks,
     
  8. DougEdey

    DougEdey I pwn all your storage

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    In your original post you stated:

    VIA use the VT827 controller on that board I believe, there is a separate Promise Fastrak controller, I would recommend you read the instruction manual as it will tell you what you need to know.
     
  9. Fippy

    Fippy What's a Dremel?

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    Yeah I got it backwards. I was using the VIA sockets which suggested that you were right about making sure that Promise was OFF.
    Last night I tried all 4 combinations of Promise On/Off and sockets on the board. No luck on any of them. I'm beginning to think that the controller is good, the drives are corrupted and that error message simply confuses the issue.

    Since I made a backup just 1 week prior to the problem, I'm tempted just to reinstall the whole system. Failing that I can always put one SATA drive into IDE mode and give up on the RAID controllers.

    Which begs a question... I can use either SATA controller in IDE mode can't I? Only the Promise one has an IDE mode in the BIOS.
    Thanks,
     
  10. DougEdey

    DougEdey I pwn all your storage

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    The promise controller has 3 sockets, 2 SATA and one IDE, I think you can stick a single IDE drive on it, but your boot times will elngthen.
     
  11. Fippy

    Fippy What's a Dremel?

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    OK, I can use SATA in non-RAID mode on either controller too, right?
     
  12. DougEdey

    DougEdey I pwn all your storage

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    You should be able to, just the PROMISE one will take longer to boot.
     
  13. Fippy

    Fippy What's a Dremel?

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    Longer than the VIA? Why is that? And what do you mean by longer? A couple of seconds or 30+ ?
     
  14. DougEdey

    DougEdey I pwn all your storage

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    The VIA Vt8237 is faster then the Promise one, the promise will always pop up and scan for arrays seperately to the VIA one (since thats integrated into the BIOS IIRC)
     
  15. Fippy

    Fippy What's a Dremel?

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    OK, I get it. I remember the Promise "Scanning for IDE drives" process. It took about 5 seconds.
    Thanks a lot Doug, I'll try a reformat tonight.
     

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