Whoa - it's a bit geeky this post... to try and keep all my readers with me and not giving up 'cause they can't understand what I'm talking about I've tried to explain some of the geekier terms - try hovering your pointer over things with dotted lines under them... to the geeks reading and hovering... I already know I've used some artistic licence with some of the definitions :-)
... but I can't get it working in my machine :-(
I bought it with an SATA controller, 'cause my motherboard is old and doesn't have any SATA ports on it... this is where the problems all started.
The controller recognised my drive whilst it was booting up, funky. Then I installed the drivers for the card in Windows and... nothing... bloody thing had now forgotten that it had ever had a drive plugged in... when hot swapping the drive with it self the drive Windows finds it, and it'll happily sit and format it all (taking 'king ages for 400 gig), then it'd let me know that "Windows can't format the drive" or some such when it had completed.
"Maybe the drive's knackered" I thought. So I took it to work and put in my desktop machine which has SATA ports built in... no problems, formatted fine. Woooooo! I put a file on it so I knew if I saw it again then the drive was working at home.
No such luck.
Well that's a little lie, I booted into an ancient version of Knoppix and it found the drive with no problems and looked at my test file!
So, it was a 'doze driver issue I thought to myself... and preceded to try and load and install every possible driver I could get my hands on for the card. Nothing worked - and I tried hundreds of bloody drivers.
Bag o'shit.
All along I was reading that I needed to make sure the version of the BIOS on the controller matched the driver... and yet I couldn't find out how to upgrade the BIOS. This morning I noticed that there were two bits of software on the manufacturer's website - "upgradebios" and "upgradeflash"... upgrade bios, doesn't actually update the BIOS on a card - it updates a BIOS image which you then need to put on the card. You do this with upgradeflash - simple when you think about it(!?) - I overlooked this last night after trying upgradebios and getting nowhere...
So I booted into DOS and proceded to try and reflash the beast. Well, it would appear I've popped my "Flash Upgrade Failed" cherry this morning.
Knackers.
What's a tad annoying is that everything I've done a flash upgrade before I've been warned a million times with something like:
** WARNING ** WARNING ** WARNING ** WARNING ** WARNING ** WARNING **
* PLEASE READ THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY AND ENTIRELY. PLEASE FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS EXACTLY AS THEY ARE STATED.
* FAILURE TO FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS COULD EITHER RESULT IN A DEFECTIVE BOARD OR UNSUCCESSFUL FLASH PROM UPDATE.
Please type 123456IAGREE12345BLAHBLAH to acknowledge that you've read the above and it's all your own fault when it goes tits up!
The program I used had no such warnings, not even a "Are you sure? (Y/N)" thing.
So now the machine refuses to boot when the card installed now, whoops. Well when I say refuses to boot I only left it for about 30 seconds before thinking "Whooooooops". Tonight I'll see if it'll give up waiting for the knackered card to start and try and give the flashing software another go... otherwise it'll be a trip to a local PC shop to buy another card - which hopefully won't have the same chipset as the last card and will work straight out of the box.
That's almost two days wasted so far! If my time were costing me it'd have been cheaper to buy a new motherboard with SATA built in!
I shall update ye all laters. That said I'm pretty certain most readers won't have read this far 'cause of all the geek speak.