Installing Drivers for ALi SATA/RAID Controller

[bumcheekcity]

https://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Controller+Cards/SATA/SATA+2-Port+PCI+Controller+Card+?productId=7730

I'm on XP Pro SP3, trying to install the drivers for what comes up on the PC as an ALi SATA/RAID Controller, and according to the drivers, it's version M5283.

I installed the drivers using the disc that came with the product, and they didn't work, so I restarted and installed them again, then they installed and said I would need a further restart to solve my problem. So, I did that and then it recognised the device with a name, but still (when I go to Hardware Management on my PC), I get a small Yellow Circle with an "!" in it in the device icon.

I USED to get two devices coming up as "Mass Storage Controller" as unknown devices when I plugged it in. I don't know why it thought the single PCI card was two storage devices, but there you go.

Then, when the drivers said they installed successfully, and I restarted, I now have one Mass Storage Controller under "Unknown Devices", and one "ALi SATA/RAID Controller" under "SCSI and RAID Controllers" in Hardware Management, but as I said, the icon for this has a small yellow exclamation mark as well as the usual grey icon for a SCSI/RAID controller.

I have another PCI-E one plugged in (I have a lot of Hard Drives), and it's a "Sil 3132 SoftRaid 5 Controller". It's worked fine, and continues to work fine.

Any help?

[bumcheekcity]

I've been advised that the problem is that it's sharing resources with another device. Specifically, I've checked out, and it's on IRQ3 (both the actual device, and the Unknown Device), as well as "NVIDIA nForce PCI System Management". This may well help.

[marsey99]

you might be able to manually asign the irq's in your bios.

check the manual that came with the mobo.

[wonderlust]

What board are you running?

On the two Ali/Uli boards I had, I still have one, I had to make my own disk up by stripping out the drivers from the integrated 2.20 driver available from Nvidia's website.

(For those that don't know ULI formally Ali were bought out by Nvidia some time ago)

[bumcheekcity]

A few restarts later, and I've got some more updates.

I removed my TV Card (I never use it anyway, and moved the SATA Card, and it was assigned an IRQ port which didn't conflict or anything, so that's OK.

I then installed the drivers, which said they worked, and restarted. That gave me a bluescreen when starting up XP (instantly, and even in safe mode) on m5228.sys.

This was the driver for the IDE controller. The single physical card has both an IDE and SATA part (2 separate drivers, hence two separate devices). So I removed the card, and uninstalled the drivers, then put the card back in, and loaded up XP.

I then installed the drivers, and DISABLED the IDE part of the card, leaving the SATA part active. Then I restarted as the computer requested me.

This time, XP took TEN MINUITES (no exaggeration) to load, where it usually took <30secs. However, once loaded, it worked ok (I'm posting this now). However, when I try to open Drive L (the drive on the card), explorer crashes momentarily, and then gave me an error. "Error performing inpage operation". Apparantly, this can often indicate physical errors with the disc (which is new, so bugger).

I'm going to restart again, which may well take 10 mins. I've just noticed though, that in Disc Management, Drive L doesnt have NTFS as a filesystem, even though it was formatted as such, previously.

[bumcheekcity]

OK, I've just restated, making no changes to the drivers nor physical setup. It took about 30/40 secs now, whch is great, but the drive still wan't working.

So I went into Disc Management, and formatted it, and it worked after a quickformat to NTFS. I guess this is fixed now. Thanks for your attempts to help, but I think I've fixed this (I can write files to the HDD), and admittedly have little idea why...