Background

I’ve been needing to upgrade my home fileserver for a while and finally broke down and bought some parts. Being afraid of losing my data, I decided I’d move to OpenSolaris so I could take advantage of the extra features ZFS has to keep my bits safe. One of the first issues I encountered was that the 2 Promise SATA300 TX4 cards I had in my computer weren’t supported in OpenSolaris. After some googling I found that the Syba SD-SATA-4P SATA controller, based on the Sil3114 chipset from Silicon Image, available on Newegg was supported as long as the non-RAID BIOS was installed on the card.

The Issue

After receiving it from Newegg, I fired up the Sun Device Detection Tool to see if it was reported as supported. It was not, but having read the reviews on Newegg I knew I needed to install the non-RAID BIOS on the card. I downloaded the 5.4.0.3 version from the Silicon Imaging site (download here) and realized I needed either a DOS boot disk or a Windows machine from which I could update it. Having neither, I pulled out one of the older computers from my closet, installed Windows XP, and proceeded to install the card’s drivers. Once that was complete I tried to flash the non-RAID BIOS, but received a pretty nasty error message:

Flash erase operation failed.

Given how finicky BIOS updates can be, I was afraid I had bricked the card. I tried the RAID bios and it flashed without an issue. I decided to try the first rule in troubleshooting a computer issue, reboot. After rebooting I was still having the issue, I tried a few more times, read a few more posts online, checked the Syba website which gave me nothing.

The Solution

About to give up hope I re-read the readme that came with the download and noticed this line:

Ensure that a SATA device is plugged into a 3114 SATA port.

I remember reading the line earlier but brushed it off, figuring that couldn’t really be required. Having tried everything else, I shutdown, plugged in a SATA drive, started back up and was able to flash the BIOS without issue. I ran the Sun Device Detection Tool again and the card was recognized and shown as being supported. I’m still curious why there needs to be a drive connected in order to flash the card.