Bad PS or Bug with Si 3112 ? XP not recognizing drive

[Treborprime]

Ok This is my system ...

AMD 64 2800 ( not overclocked)
Epox 8KDA3J Motherboard (nforce 3 250GB chipset)
Roswill 450W PS
1024MB DDR 400 Ram ( 2 sticks)
Geforce 5700 Video card AGP
PCI Si3112 Sata Raid contoller card ( raid not set up)
PCI card for extra USB and a firewire port
3 SATA 150 Hard drives all of them Western Digital Caviars ( 2 X 160GB and 1 X 80GB)
1 standard floppy drive
1 Samsung DVD CDRW drive
1 Standard CD ROM drive
3.5" front panel that has audio pass through and card readers attached to the internal motherboard USB 4 port.
3 Case fans
XP Professional SP 2 with all current updates.

Currently I am only using the SATA PCI raid card as extra ports for additional SATA drives. The 80GB WD is currently hooked to it by itself. The 2 X 160's are using the onboard SATA ports.

THis is what happens....

XP will at times not recognize the 80GB SATA drive that is on the controller. I can get it to work again if I go and disconnect one of the CD ROM drives. Than it will work. If I rehook the other CD drive it will work for awhile and then the next time I reboot XP will hang at the welcome screen for about a minute and then finish. But the drive will not be present ( its partitioned and formatted). XP will still see and recognize the PCI Si 3112 contoller card and its drivers are current. When I boot up it shows the drive as detected by the card in the bios of the card and my motherboard. But XP will not see it period. Strangely when it does see it the disk management part of windows says its disc 0 and the other two drives are discs 1 and 2.

What have i done besides disconnect the one CD drive ? My current experiment is moving the one CD ROM drive that was on the secondary IDE channel and assigning it to the primary IDE channel. I disabled the secondary IDE channel ( since the only IDE devices I am using are the CD ROM drives). I was going to use it this way for the next 24 hours and then reattached the 2nd cd drive ( I do not believe this will make a difference). TO see what happens.

So I am left with 2 conclusions. This is a bug with the PCI SATA SI 3112 card and windows XP. Or I have a power supply that is not up to the task of running everything I have. I just checked the Powersupply list here on these forums and I see Roswill is listed as a bad PS ? However the system is not behaving like something that is having powersupply issues. Which lead me to my other conclusion of this being some kind of bug ??

Wish there was a way of definitively testing a powersupply that is underpowered for the demands of the system. ( before I go and order another PS noting I am low on cash this month)

Any opinions greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Rob

[ror_b211]

The PCI card and onboard device are conflicting with eachother, you may have to use one or the other.

[Treborprime]

yes yes... bad troubleshooting on my part.

I realized this when I decided to go check if the card was sharing to many PCI IRQ's with other devices. yes low and behold it was sharing with that PCI USB Firewire card I had. I haven't had a conflict issue in years and took things for granted that it would all just work together.

Either way I did order a new powersupply anyway. I should have an extra one kicking around.