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9890 - I've lost my controller or I've lost my mind... not sure which is worse.

post #1 of 11
8/11/07 at 8:02pm
Thread Starter 
I'm in the middle of the ocean, far away from my original driver and Windows OS cd's.

I own a Sager 9890 whose RAID-0 hard disks showed all the classic signs of failure. OS crashing with increasing regularity over a short time, and eventually the 'no operating system' error message after BIOS.

After much heartache and wallet-ache as dropped down the cash for new drives and a full copy of Vista, I installed two new SATA drives into the laptop. Upon booting, no hard drives are detected by BIOS, I'm not able to enter Promise's FastTrak 378 array building utility, and it skips right to booting from a CD or if I don't have a disk in, it'll jump to the no OS message and I have to reboot or kill power.

At one point in my troubleshooting, on a whim I booted with only one hard drive installed in the lower (master) position, BIOS posted as normal, even though I somehow missed hitting F2 in time to enter and look around. I then saw the Fasttrak BIOS startup for the first time in what felt like ages. It began scanning for IDE drives, then I was treated to four lines of .................. before it finally returned an IRQ error.

I restarted again, no Fasttrak this time, but straight to "No OS installed" message.

At this point I'm running around in circles...

I now know at least that the Promise controller is still in there and may work, sort-of. Now I need to figure out why the Phoenix BIOS isn't seeing my hard drive(s).

Any ideas?
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post #2 of 11
8/13/07 at 8:59am
It looks to me like your controller is dying. It's been known to happen in the 98xx line. Just to make sure, when you switched to a single drive for troubleshooting, did you first reset the controller option in the BIOS from raid mode to ata?
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post #3 of 11
8/13/07 at 10:37am
Thread Starter 
Sad day, then. I bought the laptop when I was working in the western Pacific, figuring it'd be easy to get spare parts near the Clevo's country of origin, but now I find myself in the Caribbean, far far away.

As far as the SATA/ATA, yea, I missed that step and setting the proper option in BIOS cleared the error. This returned me to square one, which means I'm out a controller. It will be interesting to see once I fix/replace the controller whether any data can be retrieved from the original drives. I may find XP waiting for me.

Can you point me in the proper direction within the laptop where the actual controller resides? I haven't had the patience to completely disassemble the case to pull the entire mobo out yet, and to be honest, I'm used to full IDE cards in towers for RAID control, so I'm not sure what to look for in a chip aside from following the leads from where the adapter meets the wafer.

Finally, can you recommend a retailer who could sell a replacement? Surfing around it's a Promise 378, but may be known as a 20378, and I've seen fasttrak tx2000 thrown around, too, but it's hard to tell if that's just the name of the utility, or is actually linked to a piece of hardware that isn't the model used in towers.

Thanks for the help, it's refreshing to hear a voice outside my head confirming my fears/suspicions.
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post #4 of 11
8/13/07 at 12:34pm
I hate to be the one to tell you but as i've repaired countless notebooks of this model, the actual RAID controller is what is failing, if you can find a bad board with a good controller you can replace it and you should be ok..email me if u need help..
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post #5 of 11
8/14/07 at 9:49am
Didn't see it so i though i would ask. . . you do have raid turned on in the BIOS and you did boot windows w/ a floppy for the RAID drivers right?
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post #6 of 11
8/14/07 at 9:52am
The simple fact that he says it goes right to "No Os Found" kinda means the controller is gone.....and he does say he set the bios to raid...controller is bad...find a good shop that will replace it
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post #7 of 11
8/14/07 at 7:35pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jmarch23 View Post
The simple fact that he says it goes right to "No Os Found" kinda means the controller is gone.....and he does say he set the bios to raid...controller is bad...find a good shop that will replace it
Or that his controller is set in SATA non raid mode is BIOS so the fastrak BIOS wont show up and without the driver disk in the windows install it will show no HDDs. . . again since he didn't mention it. . . just my .02
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post #8 of 11
8/15/07 at 8:22am
Thread Starter 
The BIOS version I have on the machine only provides two options, RAID and ATA. Through all troubleshooting it's been set to RAID, with the exception of one single boot when it was set to ATA with a single drive in the rack, which got the Promise BIOS to give an IRQ error. Rebooting with same settings did not Repro the error, and the usual sequence repeated after that single occurence.

Since there isn't a SATA non-raid option in the Phoenix BIOS, fasttrak shouldn't have an excuse not to show, but that IRQ error tells me it's still in there lurking, but definitely failed.

I spent all my free hours yesterday in a static-free environment poring over the danged mobo looking for shorts or breaks, to no avail. There aren't any trustworthy shops out here in the 3rd world or a market in junk laptop mobo's, so it looks like I'm shipping it back to the vendor. I'll be making due with my mac in the meantime.
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post #9 of 11
8/16/07 at 11:36am
The ATA BIOS setting is used for non RAID PATA and SATA drives, as the 378 is capable of both PATA and SATA depending on the cable used, I suppose the BIOS options should really be RAID/non-RAID. You wont get any special options on booting from the controller BIOS if you've switched to ATA mode, the FastTrak options are only for RAID setups. What you should have seen was a screen that simply reported the BIOS version and "Detecting ......": thats about 6 trailers, not four lines of them. If you saw that and then got a "No OS detected" message then your controller might be functioning normally, at least in non RAID mode.

The problem is that, AFAIK, you can't boot from a drive that was used as part of a stripped array. If you did, then the BIOS might not have been able to find a proper MBR on the drive, in which case you would have seen an error message anyway. Since you seem to be determined to retrive the data from these disks, you would need to use a third spare SATA drive to really see if it would work. The point is that at least you would know that the controller works in non RAID mode. And you might be able to get it working by resetting to RAID and trying again. I've found on a number of occasions that 'try try again' often works with my 9860.

Keep in mind that RAID 0 is especially intolerant of a bad disk... it only takes one bad one to ruin the array. It could simply be that after lengthy use, the MBR on one of the disks got hosed. The IRQ error could simply have been an artifact of mode switching.

I'm curious to know how you got access to the MB. I tried taking mine apart at one point and was stymied by what seemed to me to be something connecting the board to the case somewhere near the touchpad. Perhaps a hidden screw or maybe I just needed to yank it apart...
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post #10 of 11
3/7/08 at 2:20am
Old thread but it might help someone else. I was having the same issues and sent it back to Sager for repair and it turned out that the contacts just needed to be re-soldered and everything was working again.
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post #11 of 11
4/6/08 at 8:57pm
do you know what & where it was soldered by any chance? thank you jerry
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