RAID Controller RS2WC080 Prevents Booting

[idata]

Hi All,

I recently purchased the Intel RAID RS2WC080 controller card. The specs are amazing on this little card and the LSI controller used came highly recommended for top performance with a Solaris ZFS pool. However, whenever I have the card plugged into a motherboard, I cannot boot my system.

I have tried OpenSolaris, Solaris 10 and Windows Vista. All fail to boot at Grub (or Grub4DOS in the case of Vista). Grub reports 0k lower and 0k upper memory and any command results in the error "Selected item will not fit into memory". I experience this same behavior on an AMD nForce4 board, AMD 790FX board and an Intel 790i board. I can provide more exact specifications including BIOS settings if needed to troubleshoot. In all cases, the card has been plugged into one of the two or three available PCIe x16 slots (these are CrossFire or SLI motherboards). This behavior results whether I use a single PCIe video card in addition to the RAID card, or if I use (a very old but still working) PCI video card so that the RAID controller is the only thing plugged into the PCIe bus.

Does anyone else own this card and been able to boot into Solaris (or even Vista)? What hardware are you running and did you experience any difficulties in getting this card to work? Anyone have any ideas on why Grub would see no memory and fail only when this card is plugged in?

Any help is apprecieted!!! Thank you!

-Andrew

[Edward_Z_Intel]

I haven't encountered issues like this, but if you're not booting your OS from the RAID card, you may try to disable the controller BIOS by pressing Ctrl-G during POST.

[idata]

Thanks for the response, Edward. I am not booting from any disks attached to the controller card so I did try disabling the card's BIOS. Unfortunately, that did not help and I experience the same behavior.

[Edward_Z_Intel]

You may want to check the http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/CS-031393.htm Tested hardware and operating system list.