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Although I hardly use my SD-1, due to my GT-8 having all of the overdrive settings I could possibly want, it was still annoying me that I had a faulty pedal sitting on my shelf. The problem I was experiencing was that the SD-1 was constantly stuck in its on position – Stomping on it did nothing but continue with the overdrive.

After taking it apart and hooking it back up to some power, a guitar and an amp, in its disassembled state it was working fine – Reassemble and the fault reappears. It was instantly obvious that something was shorting out against the metal casing. You’d have thought that there was some form of non-conductive coating on the base-plate – Maybe there is, but defective near the switching area of the circuit. Covering the base-plate with insulation tape fixed the issue and it’s now working perfectly again!

My media server was getting to the stage where it required some extra discs, so I purchased another pair of 500GB SATA disks and a SiI-3114 based PCI to 4-port SATA controller card to hook them up to as I was out of spare SATA ports.

Upon booting there was no sign of the cards BIOS during POST and no sign of the disks attached to it either after booting into Ubuntu, though running lspci reported that the card was present. After poking around with a mixture of Google and the Ubuntu forums, a number of people were having issues with the card but no conclusive fix had been found.

So I head on over to the Silicon Image website to check if there are any new BIOS images available, and surprisingly there was! After downloading, and realising that the only flash tool available was DOS based along with my server not having a floppy drive or a CD drive to boot into a DOS shell with I managed to get a USB stick booting into DOS with the flash tool.

To cut the story short – Flashing the card with the latest non-RAID version of the BIOS fixed my issue. It was now displaying the BIOS upon boot, and the attached disks were visible when running lshw -C disk.