Closed Spinning Disks Attached Via Addon Card Not Recognized

[Ed Zucker]

AHCI '.' and IDE '-' drive reset & diagnostic latencies in milliseconds:

  61.616

  Associating BIOS drive [80-83]:

  [ 80 81 82 83! ]

  BIOS drive count: 4

  BIOS Inter Bus Location Dev Port Intr
  ---- ----- --- -------- --- ---- ----
   80   USB  PCI  0:29:0   3                                                 

  BIOS Location Type Clas Pg Vend Devi Prt Intr Cmmd Ctrl Mast Driv Link Size
  ---- -------- ---- ---- -- ---- ---- --- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- -----
   83   0:19:0  AHCI 0106 01 8086 0F23  0   10  < AHCI Cntrl > <6.0> 3.0 120GB

                  Benchmarked: Tuesday, 2020-12-29 at 12:20

 

[PHolder]

On your ReadSpeed USB device should be a utility program PCI.EXE . Can you use this to capture some additional information about your PCI and share it here for @Steve to check into?

 

[Steve]

@Ed Zucker : Hey Ed. Yep. Unfortunately, there will definitely be some drives to which SpinRite will not be able to offer its advanced, higher performance capabilities — because it won't be able to “see” those drives. You have two of those. ReadSpeed found your standard AHCI-attached drive, but it did not see your two SCSI drives which are attached via an addon card. We can see from your posting that the card provides a BIOS interface. 80 is your booted USB, 81 & 82 are those SCSI drives and 83 is your AHCI drive. Those SCSI drives are accessible under Windows because Windows incorporates (or you added) a specific device driver for that card. But there's currently no practical way for me to support addon adapters that require third-party device drivers.

Also, because drives 81 and 82 are not shown in your table below:

BIOS Inter Bus Location Dev Port Intr
---- ----- --- -------- --- ---- ----
 80   USB  PCI  0:29:0   3

...we know that the addon card is not supporting the extended BIOS functions that would allow SpinRite to reach past 2.2 terabytes. SpinRite will be able to run on those drives, but it won't be able to see their SMART data, nor run at super speed, nor be able to work past the first 2.2 terabytes of each drive.

 

[Ed Zucker]

Hi Steve, Thanks for taking a look at it. The drives are actually SATA. I have noticed before that add-on SATA cards are always recognized as SCSI.

 

[Ed Zucker]

On your ReadSpeed USB device should be a utility program PCI.EXE . Can you use this to capture some additional information about your PCI and share it here for @Steve to check into?

Here is the output of PCI.EXE. Hope it helps. I'll also attach the output file.

+----------------------------------------------------------+
| PCI v1    Simple DOS-based PCI System Enumerator     GRC |
+----------------------------------------------------------+

+ Contemporary PCI subsystem detected.

Bus# Device Fnc Clas PgIf  Type  Vendor Device SubVen SubSys
---- ------ --- ---- ---- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------
  0    31    0  0601  00          8086   0F1C   1849   0F1C
  0    31    3  0C05  00          8086   0F12   1849   0F12
  0    29    0  0C03  20          8086   0F34   1849   0F34
  0    28    0  0604  00          8086   0F48    --     -- 
  0    28    1  0604  00          8086   0F4A    --     -- 
  0    28    2  0604  00          8086   0F4C    --     -- 
  0    28    3  0604  00          8086   0F4E    --     -- 
  0    27    0  0403  00          8086   0F04   1849   A662
  0    26    0  1080  00          8086   0F18   1849   0F18
  0    20    0  0C03  30          8086   0F35   1849   0F35
  0    19    0  0106  01   AHCI   8086   0F23   1849   0F23
  0     2    0  0300  00          8086   0F31   1849   0F31
  0     0    0  0600  00          8086   0F00   1849   0F31
  4     0    0  0200  00          10EC   8168   1849   8168
  1     0    0  0104  00   RAID   1095   3132   1095   7132

 

[Steve]

@Ed Zucker : Hi Ed. Okay, so here's what we know. That controller at 1:0:0 on your system's PCI bus identifies itself as a RAID controller. But many AHCI controllers do this too. (You may have seen that some motherboard BIOSes will have a setting for "RAID" Those are software RAID which ReadSpeed — and SpinRite — will be able to read right through.

But, the Vendor & Device tell us that the card is: “SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller” which is a Silicon Image TRUE Raid controller. Any Vendor & Device info can be looked up at the handy “Device Hunt” site. Here's the page for that controller:
https://devicehunt.com/view/type/pci/vendor/1095/device/3132

So, this is TRULY a RAID controller behind which those drives are being hidden. ReadSpeed will have examined the PCI registers being hosted by that card and will have attempted to see whether it's able to access the drives behind it. SpinRite will do the same. But neither are probably going to be able to get around the RAID controller which is deliberately blocking direct access. And even if RS or SR had drivers for that card, it's unclear that it would allow for the sort of direct access that SpinRite will need.

So the only way to run SpinRite on those will be to temporarily move their cables over to the AHCI motherboard connectors, run SpinRite, then move them back.

 

[Ed Zucker]

OK, thanks for having a look at it. I setup these drives to be are removable just for situations like this. I am looking forward to running SpinRite 6.1.