Adaptec 1430SA in Poweredge 2900 does not see any hardisks connected to the backplane

Hi,

I have a Poweredge 2900 with a PERC controller that connects the backplane with four SATA/SATA drives. I want to use Debian Linux Squeeze and the support for this controller is not that good since I need extra programs...

I want to use a RAID5 in Linux softraid mode, so I want a raid controller to just forward the drives to the operating system. Therefore, I bought an Adaptec Raid Controller 1430SA that has 4 SATA ports and is well support under Linux. You can disable the RAID functionality in the BIOS. I used a SAS-4xSATA cable (http://www.reichelt.de/?;ARTICLE=66029) to conect the first half of backplane to the Adaptec controller.

But the Adaptec controller does not see any drives during the boot process. The drives seem to get power during power on since the LEDs are shortly flashing. If I connect a SATA-drive with a normal SATA cable and power from the CD drive it is recognized. So, the Adaptec controller does work. If I reconnect the backplane to the PERC controller it recognized the drives so they are connectly mounted.

Does the PERC controller does something special about the drives that are connected to the backplane like switching them on or so? The only other possibility is that the SAS-4xSATA cable is broken...

Can you please give me any hints for my problems?

TIA