Re: installing 5.3 on Promise FastTrack 378 and Intel raid controllers

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Cristóvão Dalla Costa wrote:

> We got a new P4 server today with an Asus PC-DL deluxe motherboard w/
> Intel 875P chipset which we were disappointed to find sucks with
> respect to the RAID controllers.
>
> We managed to boot the FreeBSD installation using floppies, and when we
> get to the partitioning screen we are shown 5 disks, while we actually
> only have four (4 serial ata 120 GB drives). We configured two in raid-1
> and two in raid-0 in each of the raid controllers, and all disks that
> appear in the setup are 120 GB while we were expecting to find a 240 GB
> one corresponding to the raid-0 setup.

You set up the arrays in the BIOS prior to booting FreeBSD?  If they were
detected you should have a number of ar# devices to choose from.

The Promise controllers tend to be better supported than other ATA RAID
variants, but FreeBSD has to rely on the RAID metadata stored on the disk.
BIOS vendors are free to change the metadata format, and obviously FreeBSD
has no way of knowing whether a given system is using one of these custom
formats.

I would suggest trying to boot in verbose mode (boot -v) and look for the
metadata probes and see if it is complaining about a specific one.  You
might also check that FreeBSD is actually detecting your Promise
controller as RAID capable or if its just showing up as a generic ATA
controller.

If you are just doing simple mirroring you can use atacontrol to set up
FreeBSD-style ATA RAID partitions. The RAID controller BIOS won't know
whats going on but it will otherwise work.  Boot the install CD then go
into the fixit menu and mount CD #2. You will then have access to the
atacontrol program to set up the volumes. Once done there, boot off the
install CD again and the ar devices should appear.

Once you get installed post the output of 'dmesg' and 'pciconf -lv'; these
may help in debugging the issue.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite_at_gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org