To support a large number of hard drives on our backup machine, we bought a Sabrent SATA 4 port PCI host card (SBT-SRD4). Guess what? It hangs with our 1TB drives. In fact, it will hang with anything larger than 175 GB!
Instead of throwing it out the window, with a bit of googling, we discover that it uses the Silicon Image 3114 controller, which has a bios update and utility at: http://www.siliconimage.com/support/supportsearchresults.aspx?pid=28&cid=15&ctid=2&osid=0& . If you can make a DOS boot disk, by downloading the BIOS Update Utility for DOS and the Si3114 IDE Bios, you can unzip both onto the boot disk, reboot, and run "updflash b5304.bin".
Hmm.... I don't use floppy drives anymore. But all is still not lost! Follow Bart's instructions to make a bootable DOS CD-Rom, and copy updflash.exe and b5304.bin to your bcd\cds\cdroms\files directory before making the ISO. Then you have a nice bootable CD that can be used to flash the Sabrent SATA card. Unfortunately, since it uses Windows 98 drivers, I am unable to upload the ISO for direct download. However, I hope to have saved you some time by pointing you to useful resources.
Can you re-link Bart's instructions please?
Posted by: Scooter | September 29, 2010 at 20:54
Thanks! I fixed the link to Bart's instructions.
Posted by: rbuccigrossi | September 29, 2010 at 21:02