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I recently bought a Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe PCI-e 8x SSD to be used on my MSI 890FXA/GD70 mainboard.

I currently have two disks on SATA (1TB and 2TB). The smaller of the two holds 3 operating systems (Windows 8.1, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 14.10), the larger holds just data on two 1TB partitions.

I plugged the SSD in and booted into the existing Ubuntu installation. During boot, the card's SAS BIOS ran and showed that it had configured everything OK. However, no new drives showed up.

I tried in Windows 8.1, same story.

Since plug & pray had failed, I downloaded and installed the drivers for both OSes off the website, to no avail.

Both OSes can see the card fine (Ubuntu's lspci shows the card, same in device manager in Windows), but whatever I try, no new drives...

I thought maybe I need to switch configurations in the BIOS. That's when mysterious things started happening. If I switch to AHCI or RAID mode, the corresponding bios utility fails:

MPT BIOS Fault 09h encountered at adapter PCI(04h,00h,00h)

When I switch back to IDE mode, the card's BIOS runs again. I can't configure much in the card's configuration utility, nor in the AHCI/RAID utilities, so...I'm a bit stuck.

Perhaps I'm now too blinded by details that I'm missing something completely obvious. What could I try to get this setup working?

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  • Windows won't show any volumes (i.e. "drives") unless they actually exist on the physical hard drive. Have you checked disk management to see whether it lists the SSD as a (unassigned) storage device?
    – Mario
    Jan 12, 2015 at 8:19
  • @Mario: no, not there...will double check that. I did however check in device manager under disk drives, nothing there. The LSI/SAS controller is shown in storage controllers, but that lists no information (e.g., devices controlled by it) Jan 12, 2015 at 8:22
  • Check for an option in your BIOS to disable option ROMs. You won’t be able to boot from that SSD then, though. Also, always use AHCI.
    – Daniel B
    Jan 12, 2015 at 8:48
  • @DanielB, thanks, will do. I'm at work now, so I can't check right away..I'll post any progress here. In any case, booting won't be a problem, I can always put the bootloader on one of the other drives and then chain through to the SSD. Not as elegant perhaps, but bootspeed is not my objective (I virtually never reboot anyway, unless I need to be in Windows for some reason) Jan 12, 2015 at 8:54
  • @DanielB as for AHCI, that's obvious, but if the SAS BIOS only works in IDE mode...a quick google search turned up that BIOS error 09h relates to a 64k boundary breach, indicating a failure of some sort to chain load the SAS BIOS... Jan 12, 2015 at 9:00

1 Answer 1

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Problem solved!!

the solution was...

wait for it.....

it was not plugged.

The SSDs connected to the SAS controller need to be powered separately by a 15-pin SATA power connector that I had completely overlooked. If only I had read the manual instead of rushing things to play with my shiny new toy...

I'm gonna go hide in a corner of shame now.

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    An interesting (cough cough) design choice. Oh well. Congratulations. :)
    – Daniel B
    Jan 13, 2015 at 7:13
  • Also: Don’t forget to accept this answer, otherwise this question will keep getting pushed from time to time.
    – Daniel B
    Jan 19, 2015 at 19:00
  • @DanielB thanks, since you can't do it within 6 hours of posting it , I forgot :) Jan 20, 2015 at 8:23

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