SIL3124 is a PCI (as in old PCI, not PCI express) SATA-II con­trol­ler which I had to buy becau­se my NAS’ old Giga­by­te mother­bo­ard sup­ports (down­spe­eded) SATA-II dri­ves only to 750GB size. Of cour­se I got to know this AFTER buy­ing 1,5TB drive 😉

Any­way, it’s always uphill and even tho­ugh SIL3124 card sees the dri­ve and I’ve instal­led Ubun­tu Server with no pro­blems to it, I could­n’t boot the card. It kept say­ing „no valid devi­ce”. Turns out it has a RAID-only BIOS by default so if some­one — like me — wants to use it as an JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) con­trol­ler, BIOS upgra­de is needed. How user frien­dly not to men­tion it in a — Czech-lan­gu­age — manual.

Of cour­se, being main­ly a Linux user with no CD- or DVD-dri­ve, I have it even more uphill. BIOS fla­shing tools are ava­ila­ble for Win­dows and DOS. Soooo the solu­tion is:

1. Use HP USB Disk Sto­ra­ge For­mat Tool to cre­ate boota­ble DOS pen­dri­ve, here­’s Polish lan­gu­age tuto­rial: http://​forum​.purepc​.pl/​D​y​s​k​i​-​t​w​a​r​d​e​-​c​d​r​o​m​y​-​d​v​d​-​p​e​n​d​r​i​v​e​-​i​n​n​e​-​p​a​m​i​e​c​i​-​f​5​5​/​B​o​o​t​-​P​e​n​d​r​i​v​e​-​t​2​5​4​0​0​5​.​h​tml if You don’t spe­ak Polish, just google „boot pen­dri­ve dos”, in the tuto­rial is a link to Win98 boot files You might use.
2. Down­lo­ad UPDFLASH and the newest BIOS zip from http://​www​.sili​co​ni​ma​ge​.com/​s​u​p​p​ort
3. The zip file has more than one BIOS insi­de, read the README and see which one is „IDE” BIOS or „non-RAID” BIOS. Copy the file toge­ther with UPDFLASH to the pendrive.
4. Boot the PC with the PCI SATA Con­trol­ler from the pendrive.
5. Run „upd­flash biosfile.bin”
6. If you don’t have a UPS, pray to Athe­ist’s God™ that the­re­’s no blac­ko­ut during fla­shing process.
7. Use mother­bo­ar­d’s (not SATA con­trol­le­r’s) BIOS to set Hard Dri­ve as first boot prio­ri­ty, make sure the­re­’s „Boota­ble Add-In Cards” ena­bled somewhere.
8. Reset and enjoy boota­ble lar­ge drives.

Note: Dri­ve­’s UUIDs chan­ge becau­se of that so it’s best to do it BEFORE instal­ling Ubun­tu, other­wi­se You get a main­ta­nan­ce console.