PCH-DL and NCCH-DL PCI initialization

[chey229]

Hello,

I have an Asus PCH-DL and an Asus NCCH-DL board (only one of them is used, but the problem stands for both). I have a regular PCI SATA card (Silicon Image SIL3512) in one of the regular PCI slots for the DVD drive, and an Areca ARC1110 card for the HDD's in one of the 64-bit slots. Though both boards have on-board SATA, my Samsung DVD does not like them (sometimes the drive cannot be seen by the BIOS).

Both of the boards initialize the PCI-X bus first, then the 32-bit PCI bus. The problem is that the Areca card needs relatively long time to initiailze itself, and only after it comes the Silicon Image. The boot-up time could be reduced by ~10 seconds or more if the Silicon Image card would search for the drives first and during that, the Areca could finalize its initialization (test CPU, BIOS, RAM, PCI-bus, etc.).

Can this be solved by a BIOS mod?

Both boards are based on the i875P (Canterwood) MCH and the 6300ESB (Hence Rapid) ICH. They have AGP, PCI-X and PCI. The BIOSes are also similar.
Thanks for the help in advance.

Greetings,
Dani

P. s.: I attached the original BIOSes of the two boards.

EDIT 1: I accidentally uploaded the wrong BIOS image for the NCCH-DL, the 1004 is buggy. I replaced it by the 1003.

EDIT 2: The problem could be partially solved for the PCH-DL. I put the Silicon Image card in the first PCI-X slot, so now it is initialized before the Areca card. Since both are capable of the PCI clock of 66 MHz, this did not decrease the bandwidth of the Areca card. However, this cannot be done for the NCCH-DL because the cooler of the video card overlaps the first PCI-X slot.