CD-ROM not detected when using SATA RAID (ASUS M3A78-CM)

I came across a problem with my AMD 780V / SB700 based ASUS M3A78-CM Motherboard today.

With the bios version it shipped with (1201), I set up a RAID-1 (though I'll bet this issue presents its self in RAID-0 or JBOD as well) and once I had the SATA CDROM was no longer detected in BIOS nor would it boot my installation CD.

With the system set to the standard non-RAID SATA configuration the CDROM is detected.

After some reading I found that the motherboard indicates that SATA ports 5 and 6 do not work in the standard SATA mode. But to make matters more annoying, it does happen to specifically state that they do work in SATA or AHCI mode. Well, this appears to be a bad mistake on the technical writer's part. (I reread the sentence five times just to make sure I wasn't crazy)

The opposite is what appears to be true in my testing. RAID ports 5 and 6 works just fine in the standard mode, but RAID can only use ports 1 through 4. So this includes my SATA CDROM which had been sitting on port 6.

Simply move it over two slots and it's fixed! Still I can't say I'm thrilled about this particular "feature" of the motherboard or perhapse, chipset would be more accurate. If you give me six plugs, give me six plugs!!!

To be fair, I should also say that this MoBo is pretty killer. It did all sorts of other things right, for instance, it calculated the fastest possible speed for the memory I put in. rated for 1066mhz at CAS 5, it deftly decided to run it at 900-something mhz at CAS4 for an overall boost in memory bandwidth. Kudos to AMD and ASUS for that much.

Anyone interested in tryding other BIOS versions my look here: ASUS Downloads
However there is only one BIOS version newer than the one I am using and the changelog does not indicate anything regarding RAID. All AM3 fixes mostly.

Shared Hosting and Kohana

Once upon a time I set out to try and run the Kohana PHP Framwork on godaddy's new grid hosting plan (beta).

If this already sounds like a bad idea to some of you, don't worry, it does to me too. But I was cheap, foolhardy, and bored.

Much to my surprise I was able to get further than expected with the Installation without much trouble. I had downloaded a copy of Kohana from kohanaphp.com and uploaded it to my godaddy hosting account.

I got the "install" screen to come up and tell me that everything was green and happy. I was shocked to find that at least from Kohana's viewpoint everything about my godaddy account was set up as desired.

However there does seem to be a problem with loading anything more than the index page. all urls weather they be written /index.php/welcome or the cleaner /welcome using .htaccess it won't work.

I tried a number of things with .htaccess to attempt to fix the problem to but to no avail. I may attempt this again in the future, but at the end of journey, I ended up getting shared hosting from Web Faction.

It's a little odd at first, but the "PHP, CGI or static site" option that you can use for the software / webapp install as they call it, is configured so that Kohana works perfectly right out of the box. So for now, those of you looking for cheap shared hosting that works well with Kohana, it's a good option.

Tell them "roblynch" refered you and help me keep my personal sites up. Thanks!

If anyone else knows of good shared hosting that supports Kohana please let me know. I'd like to compile a list for the benefit of the community.

Just because I'm not getting paid...

... doesn't mean I'm not finding plenty of work to do. What a busy week: Server upgrades at the office, still moving into the new house, and building web sites as always. It's been almost two months since I swore off paid jobs and I'm doing well with that. I've turned down a lot of jobs and have in turn had a lot more time for the projects that matter to me.

One great example is that I was able to build this site: Open Airwaves Design, for my younger brother, the artist, musician, all around cool guy of the family.

I'm rather proud of this bit of web code not so much because it does anything impressive, but more because from the time I typed in the URL of my domain registrar to the time that I finished the site, only 35 minutes had passed.

This included cutting up photoshop images, writing a little bit of dynamic code to read the portfolio directory that he can upload pictures into, and even an interruption to answer a computer question.

In any event, I'm glad that I got to do this and I'm even happier that I don;t feel too burnt out to do these projects. I'm thrilled with my new years resolution so far and hope to keep the feeling going!