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Well, this was an epic fail. I mean, my actual suspect was my Samsung drive (HD753LJ) which is why I went on e-bay to acquire me a WD one for comparison. Very same problem. And now I'm certain: it is the chipset of the SATA controller which is at fault, not the hard drive. Definitely not.
When either the Samsung or the WD drive are plugged in at boot time into my controller card, the SiI SATALink chip displays its copyright stuff, then tries to initialize the drive, still recognizes the drive and ... stalls (blinking cursor).
So I made an experiment: I replaced my Adaptec 1205SA (SiI SATALink chipset as well) by another card with the SATALink chipset on it, and yet another one with a SiI chipset. The behavior was fully identical. But luckily I had another one in my "arsenal", a SATA TX4 by Promise. And the Promise one totally lived up to its name, as it looked very promising that it would work due to the different chipset. And indeed, the initialisation did work this time!
So I stopped believing that my HDD was actually faulty, as I bought an entirely different one that had the very same problem with this chipset! Plus, I even revived an ancient mainboard I still had with a Promise PDC 20376 chip onboard. Worked a treat as well!!
So has anyone of you guys ever noticed this special behavior of a controller card with a SATALink chipset? I can't believe I'm all alone here...
syntaxerror
Posted 2015-09-10T22:03:58.973
Reputation: 505
Could it be the combination of your motherboard BIOS version and that Sil SATALink chipset? Update BIOS and confirm that controller in another PC? All with known good cables as usual. – StackAbstraction – 2015-09-10T22:51:10.880
What motherboard do you have? Did you try the controller in different slots on the board? Did you try disabling "Load option ROMs in your BIOS setup"? – I say Reinstate Monica – 2015-09-10T23:17:26.233
@Twisty Oh, that's quite an old machine (Socket 462 to be exact). This is an Award BIOS and this (peculiar) option does not seem to be available. I guess that's a typical AMI BIOS option though. :) Anyways, as the great part of HDD initialization is done via the external SATA controller circuit mounted on the expansion card, I wonder if the PC's BIOS doesn't actually play a minor role here... – syntaxerror – 2015-09-11T00:42:50.793
1It may or may not. If you're not trying to boot from the drives connected to the controller, often you can bypass obstinate add-in controller BIOSes by not loading them, then let your OS load the controller's driver later to access the drives. FWIW I've encountered similar issues with Silicon Image-based chipsets, frequently (but not always) teaching it back to a compatibility issue with the motherboard initializing the add-in card's BIOS. Is there a jumper on the card to disable its BIOS? – I say Reinstate Monica – 2015-09-11T00:53:43.227
FWIW I've encountered similar issues with Silicon Image-based chipsets. So indeed you did? Well I knew I was not making this up.---To your question: while the 1205SA doesn't have any way to disable its BIOS, this other no-name 4-port one (
E105181printed on PCB) might indeed. There is a jumper on it named CN5. However, it might as well serve a total different purpose... – syntaxerror – 2015-09-11T02:27:16.817