Missing drives

[cjohnson]

I've just installed the latest version (9.2.0.1 - Shigawire (revision 972) ). I've gone into the GUI (Disk Management) and hit both of the Import buttons. Only 14 of my 18 disks show up. The missing disks are physically attached to a Perc H310 flashed into IT mode w/o a BIOS. The card is installed an S5000psl board. The card does show up in the output of "pciconf -lv". Is there a way to interrogate the controller more? Something else I can do to troubleshoot?

[b0ssman]

if 4 drives are missing it might be the SFF-8087 cable connecting the 4 drives

[cjohnson]

You're right. I didn't want to believe it but, it was in fact... the cable(s).

I bought two of them from e-bay when I bought the card itself and, I just couldn't believe they were at fault. For about a week now I was going crazy, trying different motherboards, flashing and re-flashing firmwares.....trying all sorts of things. In the end, I happened to find another reverse breakout cable that I forgot I had. It had originally come with a supermicro 5-in-3 caddy/backplane. I plugged that cable in and fired up a livecd and VIOLA! "fdisk -l" showed me disks attached. So, I guess I'm off to find some new cables.

Since we're on the topic of cables, has anyone here recently bought any reverse breakout cables that actually work? Can you recommend a good source for them to me? I'm on the east coast of the U.S. so I'll have to exclude anything in the UK/Europe. Thanks in advance, and thanks b0ssman too.

[b0ssman]

i heard good things about the monoprice cables

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=1 ... 1&format=2