eSATA RAID causes blue screen of death on new Supermicro system

[Paul J Steinberg]

I have a new Wrangler system from 1Beyond (http://www.1beyond.com/products/mobilehexdflex.asp?search=3dproduction) Dual E2600 6-core Xeon's on a Romley motherboard from SuperMicro (I'm guessing it is the X9DRL-iF). They have configured two of the internal SATA connectors to a backplate to be used with eSATA drives. All is ok if I connect a single drive via eSATA but if I connect a RAID I get a blue screen of death and a "DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_EQUAL” error.The motherboard is running the C600 SATA chipset and I've tried updating the drivers from intel without any success.Should I be able to connect an eSATA RAID to this machine (port multiplying) and if yes, any ideas?Thanks!

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Could be caused by a couple things. Try both ports, different cables, etc.. If it happens instantly when you connect the drive, there's a good bet it's caused by an improperly wired or improperly grounded connection -- bad cable, bad connector, improperly grounded SATA plug or cable.

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

Thanks Jeff. It is happening to both connectors they have jumped from the MB to the back panel. If I enter the BIOS I can see the RAID box but Win7/64 crashes on boot.

Still sound like a bad cable?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Possibly still a bad cable/connection/ground. May be a driver issue within Win7. I would make sure the motherboard has the latest BIOS installed (absolutely necessary on these new Romley boards) and then make sure you download and reinstall all the chipset support drivers. Double check all the wiring and whatnot.

If the problem doesn't appear until you get into Windows, there's a good bet it's more an issue related to drivers or eSATA compatibility. You can see issues like this if the RAID uses an incompatible SATA multiplier. All the more reason to make sure all the drivers and firmware are up to date. Also goes for the RAID unit as well, if possible, the problem may be with that unit and not the system.