Post-Installation - Promise Technology SuperTrak SX6000 User Manual

SuperTrak SX6000™ User Manual
The SuperTrak SX6000 controller is fully PCI PnP. This means all the
A:
resources that it uses are assigned by the PCI BIOS on the motherboard.
While SuperTrak SX6000 supports the IRQ sharing feature, this will only
work if all the PCI devices used support it. If your motherboard allows you
to control the assignment of these resources, you may be able to change
them manually (see motherboard BIOS documentation for how to perform
this task). If not, resource assignments may otherwise be changed by
switching the PCI slot that the controller is in.

Post-Installation

(Power Up, BIOS Initialization, Memory Managers, Caching, Booting)
Q: Why does my SuperTrak SX6000 take so long to power up and get a signal to
the VGA monitor now that the SuperTrak SX6000 card is installed?
The process should only take a few seconds at most. The SuperTrak
A:
SX6000 controller performs an intensive memory check each time at
power-up. This assures the integrity of your system data during normal data
caching operation. The greater the amount of RAM installed on the
controller, the longer this process takes to verify memory. The memory-
scan places a hold on the PCI bus and suspends system boot temporarily
until the scan is complete.
Why does the SuperTrak SX6000 BIOS take so long to initialize the card? Is
Q:
there a problem?
A: Generally, this does not indicate a problem. The SuperTrak SX6000 card
initialization is a rather involved process. The BIOS sends a few messages
to the SuperTrak SX6000 controller during the initialization and spends
most of the time waiting for the card to complete the requested task. The
tasks initialize the hardware device layer (which performs hard drive
detection), the RAID engine (which detects and sets up multiple tables and
buffers for RAID operation), the cache module, device attachment
messages, and system control information (including controller card, driver
and operating system version control information). The amount of time
required for initialization is not an indication of a problem.
Q: How can I be sure that write-back cache has flushed before I reboot after
partitioning and formatting an array?
A: A cache flush is always triggered immediately following any write from the
int 13h BIOS. This level of array support is what FDISK and FORMAT use
to access the drive from MSDOS. With no delay in the write operation,
there is no cached data waiting to be written. If you are running from NT or
other operating system, as usual, make sure to shut down the operating
system properly so that the operating system can trigger and flush the
cache as necessary.
- B4 -
Appendix B