Epox mainboard & Sil 3512 cards

[kylegordon]

Hi folks,

I have a Epox EP-8KTA3+PRO mainboard, and two Silicon Image 3512 dual port SATA controllers. The system boots up fine with 2 SATA drives plugged in (any combination of ports and cards), but fails when 3 are plugged in. It has only one IDE device, an old 1Gb drive holding the OS. Using both Grub, Lilo and Windows, it fails at the bit where it would hand over control to the kernel. The onboard diagnostics display says FF, which is "Boot attempt (INT 19h)". Both cards and the mainboard are on the latest BIOS revs, and I've tried downgrading to all versions, but that fails as well.

An identical configuration works fine on my Asus A7V8X-X (which has 4 IDE devices connected as well), so I don't believe that it's the cards at fault. Both cards display their detection output during startup on the Epox, and list the connected drives.

Does anyone have any thoughts or advice on what to do next? My next step is going to be purchasing another mainboard...

Kyle