[tech] martello sata 3124 cards

[James Andrewartha]

As you may have noticed, martello was down for a few hours this afternoon. 
JCF and I decided to install the new SATA cards into martello. Things 
didn't go to plan - the cards' BIOS took a very long time to probe the 
disks, and then claimed there weren't any. Some experimentation showed 
that they had no problem with no drives connected, but obviously that's 
not very useful.

We decided to flash the motherboard BIOS, in case it was some PCI bug that 
had been fixed, but that didn't change anything. So then we went and 
flashed the SATA cards' BIOS. The first one went ok, but the BIOS no 
longer appeared during boot, however Linux detected them fine. The second 
one refused to be detected by the flash program, despite the flash chip 
being listed as supported. So we looked it up, and worked out the size and 
selected the similar chip in the menu we were helpfully presented with, 
but that didn't work either, and the BOIS version was reported as garbage. 
In the end we gave up and just left the working card in there, with 4 
drives on it and the boot and another drive on the onboard controller.

On the plus side, SMART now works because we can run a recent kernel 
version. We should talk to AusPCMarket and get a replacement card.


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