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JoeZam
Contributor
Contributor

SATA Drive Problem with SIL 3512 Controller

Hello all,

I'm having an issue with VMWare ESX Server 3i 3.5 recognizing my sata drives. I have VMWare installed on an IDE, and then two additional SATA drives are installed on the server. BIOS recognizes them.

Under "Storage Adapters" I can see them, and they each show 931.51 GB (1tb drives), but they aren't showing under "Storage". Any help or insight is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Joe Z

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

If BIOS or Linux recognize the controller is not enought to create datastore for ESX/ESXi.

You have to verify if your controller is in HCL.

Andre

**if you found this or any other answer useful please consider allocating points for helpful or correct answers

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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JoeZam
Contributor
Contributor

From everything I'm reading, people seem to be using this same card without problem.

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GabVanZ
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi

Maybe I'm saying something stupid. But when you see them under storage adapters, goto storage. Then click ADD Storage, now you should see the disks and format them as VMFS.

Gabrie

JoeZam
Contributor
Contributor

Gabrie,

Actually, I wasn't aware of that until you pointed it out! WHen I click it, the system kinda hangs and then I get an error saying "The request faild because the remote server took too long to respond."

I have another box that is identical except no SATA drives and clicking that works for me...with these SATAs installed though it's timing out.

Any suggestions?

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GabVanZ
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Check you /var/log/vmkernel to see what is going wrong.

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HughBorg707
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Joe,

I have an Adaptec eSATA & USB 2.0 combo card with the same Sil 3512 chipset. I was able to get the card and two drives, one internal SATA and the other eSATA to work when running them in my test machine which is 680i motherboard based. (I know, gaming MB but it runs 1066FSB just great for testing) With that machine I am booting off the internal SATA and was able to use the eSATA for additional storage for VMs etc.

My problem came when I tried to put this same card into a Dell PE 2650. The Dell BIOS would see the card, but not the eSATA drive attached to it. I posed the question in a VMWare group on LinkedIn and worked with a guy that suggested that I try a Sil 3114 chipset based card. It turns out I had a SiiG 4 port (all internal) SATA RAID card. I flashed that card with latest BIOS in non-RAID mode, and attached a SATA-to-eSATA bracket mount and attached the drive.

This time when the Dell booted up, it saw the new card AND the eSATA drive hanging off of it. Once ESX was up and running, adding and using the drive was no problem.

For your situation I would suggest that you take the IDE out of the equation and see if you can install & boot from the internal SATA. Also what I learned is that while the chipset, in this case Sil3512 may run under ESX on some machines, it doesn't work that way on all hardware. You just have to try different things to find a match.

Hope this helps

JoeZam
Contributor
Contributor

Can someone please point me to an inexpensive sata controller on ebay that will work?

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Have a look on:

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3.5/Whiteboxes_SATA_Controllers_for_ESX_3.5_3i.htm

Andre

**if you found this or any other answer useful please consider allocating points for helpful or correct answers

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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