So I recently decided to expand my storage capacity by almost 300%. I bought two 300GB SATA drives to add to a 250GB SATA and 80GB PATA drives.

My motherboard has two SATA ports, so naturally if I wanted to use all three SATA drives that are now on my system, I'd at least need a controller card. I'll be the first to admit it, this sure doesn't look like it would be the greatest card in the world. But I would expect it to function for what I need it for, which is just to get these drives on my system so I can store files on them.

So here's the issue: I can't fully boot my computer. It'll post, and it will get to the section where the each SATA controller will do its thing and look for drives attached to it. Both of them can successfully identify drives connected to them. That's it. It simply stops and goes no further.

In any configuration of the three drives on the two controllers, the configuration that causes this to happen is when any drive is plugged into the PCI controller card. Any two drives can be connected to the motherboard with zero problems. But when I connect any combination of drives to the PCI card, I can't boot. I can, however, boot with no drives on the PCI card.

My first thought was that the system was trying to boot to whatever drive was connected to the card. I can't test this because my boot drive is the PATA drive. Besides, it didn't seem that it was getting to the boot point yet, which is usually right after it says "verifying DMI pool data."

Does anyone have any ideas? The thought of having another ~570GB of storage is killing me!

See if your BIOS allows specifying a boot-device search order. "offboard" or "SCSI" should be at the tail end of the list, or not on it at all.

If you're running Linux, then you can probably remove the BIOS chip from the expansion card and eliminate the problem that way.

I'll check again, but I didn't see anything in the BIOS that would indicate the system was trying to boot to this thing, even though that's the most likely explanation. I'll look through it again tonight.

Well, I looked through the BIOS again, and there's nothing. I don't even see an option to disable the onboard SATA contoller...