[RESOLVED] FastTrak does not detect proper interrupts

I am having an awful problem with my Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 RAID controller.

Have used this card in PC for years. Had RAID-5 4x 250GB disks formated drive NTFS working fine.

Woke up this morning, new problem "FastTrak does not detect proper interrupts" - computer hangs, will not boot. There was lightning last night, but I had my power supply switched to OFF in the back, but still plugged in to the wall.

I moved the card to a second PC (but same power supply) and same issue.

If no drives attached, computer recognizes card fine and boots fine, and Local PAM can see the card and the channel and all 4 channels.

However with 1, 2, 3, or 4 drives plugged in to the SATA data lines, the same problem occurs "FastTrak does not detect proper interrupts" - cant boot past this.

P.S.

I have disabled all COM ports, and the Parralel port, and disabled USB!

hmm. Maybe an important bios setting was changed. Is your device still at the top for boot order?
also, and this is a long shot, you tried 1-4 drives connected to it, but perhaps you had a drive fail and it just happened to be the first drive you connected (or last one you unhooked)

A) definitely no BIOS changes
B) Device is not in boot sequence - it is not booted to or bootable. Just a RAID drive hangin out there.
C) I have had each drive hooked up independently, like drive 1, drive 2, drive 3, and drive 4. Also I have tried various combinations of drives, but I get this error as long as there is at least 1 drive hooked up.
D) I just went out and bought a 650W PSU, just to try, but same problem.
E) There is more to the error - I will post it all verbatim:

Code:

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FastTrak S150 SX4 (tm) BIOS Version 2.0.0.3
(c) 2002-2005 Promise Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
Scanning IDE drives ...........................................................

Warning - FastTrak does not detect proper interrupts,
Please check your HardWare and PCI IRQ setup, make sure the PCI slot support Bus Master operations

.

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This is the last sequence after POST, and just sits there. Can't boot past it unless I disconnect all the drives.

Very strange as this RAID card/drives just worked yesterday! I am suspecting a bad card, but I want my data!!!

Kept on rebooting, reseating cables/cards, kept trying different PCI slots, etc. I even reseated the FastTrak's on-board RAM chip.

Put back in 1st PC, paused during FastTrak BIOS load, and got strange error flashed across the screen about an error in the DIMM.... Aha a new lead!

Dug threw my bone-yard until I found an old compatible RAM chip (PC133 128MB) happens to be same size as original.

Went through the main-board BIOS and turned off everything including USB, rebooted with "new" RAM buffer chip, and presto, ala mango!

OK sorry I am just a bit pumped that I didn't lose a decade of data!

Next I will reboot with USB and see if it's still OK... Maybe after a quick DVD backup.... Hmm how to back up 40GBs...

i won't give you the "you should have been backing up all along" speech. But the basic question is do you really have 40 gb of data, or does that include installed programs?

But basically i would suggest you buy a cheap IDE hard drive, mount it and back up to it. Windows back up program that comes with vista and 7 is capable of backing up to a 2nd hard drive (or 5th in this case)

<Christopher Walken>Wowee-wow-WOW!</Christopher Walken>

A) Yes I usually have a spare IDE drive to hold my 40GB of my irreplaceable personal data (IPD), but I recently used it to install a clean Vista for my second PC, which seemed to have a trojan in the XP OS. That was like 1 week ago, so I havent covered that base yet.
B) Last night I was booting to the RAID PC just fine, and I copied all the IPD to that boot drive, to do a fast-ish backup
C) Woke up today and could not boot to RAID PC. Eventually the boot drive started SMOKING! Lost that backup.
D) Moved all RAID card and drive harware to gaming PC (WinXP). Had all kinds of system errors trying to import the new "Foreign disk". Basically from the Disk Mangler, I saw the new drive device as a Yellow triangle and exclamation pt, and it was called a Foreign disk or something. I didnt grab screenshots. I did right-click, Import Foreign media, but I got this error seen on the left in the photo, and a follow-up info message on the right.

Solved this issue by searching through the registry for the 2 instances of "TbserverDg0", made export backups of the registry entries, and renamed the "Primary Disk Group" key's Name String from "TbserverDg0", to "TbserverDg0a".

Had to reboot, and this time I was succesful in importing the foreign media.

Gotta copy this out, hope it doesn't fry THIS PC's HD now...