Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

I've been given this Shuttle X a few months back. Before i even got to take a look at it, i ended up borrowing it to someone who didn't use it at all, finally got it back a couple days ago. It didn't work. Turns out the Clear CMOS jumper was missing - this machine doesn't even spin the CPU fan if that's missing, very interesting.

Tried to put my laptop HDDs in, turns out i was SOL with the onboard VIA SATA controller, unless my HDDs have jumpers for SATA 1 mode, which they don't. I had this Silicon Image card lying around, but i had a problem with it. For some reason i cannot comprehend, one of the SATA ports was on the back of the card, on the PCI bracket, instead of inside the computer. Nothing my soldering iron, braid and flux couldn't fix.

Btw, the notation on the PCB is reversed. The hacked port, labeled SATA 2, is actually SATA port 0, and is where the boot HDD (the 160GB WD) is connected.

Then, of course, more trouble. I needed to flash a "base" (non-RAID) BIOS on the Sil3112A before Win7 would let me install - it would deny me installation because "your computer may not be able to boot from this drive". Really? Fortunately, flashing a non-RAID BIOS on the card allowed me to proceed.

I would have installed XP, but it crashed with a 7B BSOD after text mode setup. I think the driver for the Sil3112A on that CD is wrong, because it kept calling it "ASH1205" and i'm quite sure it said Sil3112A when i had this card in my dual-PIII and it worked.

Unfortunately i don't have the funky CPU heatsink w/heatpipes the Shuttle came stock with, if anyone has one lying around, maybe we can make a deal. The SATA power connectors are another hack as it didn't have those, but i didn't post pics of that as there's nothing particularly interesting about soldering some wires to a PSU PCB.

[ben7]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

Ugh, looks like the mobo has yucky caps on it. Better replace those! :O

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

It's full of OSTs but all are good. PSU has Panasonic primary and all Teapos in secondary, again, everything's fine. Apart from a low 12v rail, it works perfectly. This board isn't worth investing any money in, and it does fine as it is, so i'm leaving it at that.

I was even able to overclock the 1.5GHz Sempron 2200+ to 1.71GHz (190FSB), and that with reduced voltage, 1.425v as opposed to 1.6v stock! It now runs faster AND cooler than stock. I was also able to tweak the RAM timings quite a bit. The FSB won't go any higher without BSODing because this board does not have PCI/AGP locks.

I should be getting an Athlon 2600+ to play with in the next few days, looks like this little machine will actually be useful.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

You should have bought the super duper high end version with jumper switches for selecting eSATA or SATA mode

On mine they recouped the losses in the jumper switches by using a ROM instead of a EEPROM so the BIOS can't be upgraded, fantastic!

Btw, could you not just have loaded the RAID drivers for it in Windows setup instead of installing the base BIOS on it?

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

I had to load drivers in both cases. The problem was that in RAID mode Windows 7 threw an error message saying it could not be installed on this disk, because the system may not support booting from this disk, and didn't allow me to go further. Something like this:

[lti]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

They put the RAID BIOS on it when it only has one internal SATA port, and the external port is a standard SATA port instead of eSATA?

[Per Hansson]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

lti: Haha, yea, it did not even occur to me until you said it now, Amazing!

[Gabriel]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

I have a cardbus Sil3112 in my drawer, had to see if I was able to flash the card. Tried every driver on Silicon Image homepage but the browse and program flash was greyd out.

Also tried the windows flash tool, could not get it to work.

Got courious, maybe I will open the pcmcia card and see what chip it has and do a manually flash.

[larrymoencurly]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

I've never been able to get the Windows flasher for Silicon Image to work, but the DOS flasher always worked for me (had to boot to DOS). There's also a utility that supports those cards plus several others, at http://www.FlashROM.org.

[Gabriel]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

Opened the pcmcia card, sadly no separate eprom on this board so no chance of updating the firmware.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATALink port hack

In the meantime, i've unlocked my Sempy via the L5 bridge method, and have bumped it up to 2GHz at x11 multiplier (was locked at x9 previously). I'm kinda pushing the FSB limit of the motherboard tho, so i might take it out again and cut some of the L6 bridges to get even higher multipliers.

I have an Athlon XP 2600+ coming in the mail, but i think i'm still going to play with the Sempron a bit more, just for fun.