weird scsi controller shennanigans

My main Linux workstation uses a pair of u320 300GB SCSI drives with a pair of RAID1 arrays (Linux RAID) attached with a LSI Logic LSI20320-R MPT Fusion based controller. This card has stood me in good stead for quite a few years now. It is a HP branded one I bought on Ebay, however, I flashed it with the LSI generic firmware I found.

My motherboard is an Asus NCT-D with 1 PCI-e, 1xPCI-e x16 three PCI-X and a single PCI card slot. I wanted to place a PCI card DVB-S in there to act as a slave MYTHTV backend to serve the satellite channels. The only free slot was the one above the SCSI card. However, after adding the DVB-S card my machine refused to boot. The SCSI BIOS did not load.

It appears that this card MUST be the first card in all the PCI slots (does’t include the PCI-e slots). I’ve never come across this before in many years of messing with scsi host adapters!