Re: Promise TX2300

Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 January 2006 13:32, Jacky Jack wrote:
> 
>>Booting off of the 6.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly or disc1 with a Promise TX2300
>>card installed causes my box to reboot at the bootloader.  Once the card is
>>pulled out I can boot off of either ISO's.
>>
>>Is there any known issues with the TX2300 card?
> 
> 
> I've had problems with Promise FT100/TX2 controllers with those symptons. Also 
> I have seen the loader spin dumping register info until you press the reset 
> switch.

I got a Promise 300TX2plus (no RAID) and have the same problems. The 
onboard SIL 3112 also triggers reboots. For some strange reason the 
behaviour is a little different after a cold start. After a cold start 
it reboots after the kernel got loaded and not while trying to load the 
kernel. That's the behaviour after the first reboot.

> I found it was only a problem if an array was defined (hah, only..), it seemed 
> to only happen on some BIOSen - I had no trouble with older K7 Epox 
> motherboards but P4 ones and AMD64 Epox boards exhibited it.

Problem board is a nforce2 asus board.

> Unfortunately the only work around I have is to install on one disk using the 
> motherboard controller then mirror onto the other after connecting it to the 
> RAID. Obviously this only works if you want a mirror and is a PITA.

Think of one drive and no-floppy and you need to reinstall the bootloader.

> I am not sure how to properly fix it though, or even whos fault it is 
> (FreeBSD, mobo maker, or Promise) - in the P4 case I found that the BIOS 
> would freeze solid when you entered the menu if an array was defined on the 
> RAID card :(

Older install CDs boot if they emulate a floppy.

Hendrik

-- 
Ahhh there's only 10 types of people in the world,
those who understand binary and those who don't...