Promise SATAII 150 TX4, instant reboot when bootloader starts

[Johan Ström]

Hi

I'm about to upgrade my server, throwing out an old 80Gb PATA-disk  
running Slackware, and replacing it with two SATA drives in RAID1  
using gmirror (yeah, replacing Slack with FreeBSD, I have seen the  
light! ;)).
Well, after some googling which didnt make me much brighter, I went  
out and bought a Promise SATAII 150 TX4 controller card. I've also  
ordered two Maxtor MaxLine 300GB, but don't have them here yet.

So, to find out if the card played nice with FreeBSD, I took down my  
workstation (a XP3200+ on a MSI K8N Platinum mobo, nForce3 250GB  
chipset) and plugged in the Promise card.
Downloaded 6.0-RC1-amd64-bootonly.iso and put it on a CD-RW. Pulled  
my current SATA disk, a Western Digital 37Gb Raptor, from the onboard  
SATA. Booted from CD.
So far, so good... Looked nice, the card was found!


atapci0: <nVidia nForce3 Pro UDMA133 controller> ....
...
atapci1: <nVidia nForce3 Pro SATA150 controller> ....
...
atapci2: <nVidia nForce3 Pro SATA150 controller> ....
...
...
atapci3: <Promise PDC40518 SATA150 controller> port 0x9400-0x947f, 
0x9800-0x98ff mem 0xe4021000-0xe4021fff,0xe4000000-0xe401ffff irq 19  
at device 9.0 on pci2
ata6: <ATA channel 0> on atapci3
ata7: <ATA channel 1> on atapci3
ata8: <ATA channel 2> on atapci3
ata9: <ATA channel 3> on atapci3


Nice! Took the computer down again, connected the Raptor drive to the  
Promise card.
Booted again, selected CD Boot. Now the bad things starts to happen.  
I see the regular Booting from CD:... prompt (BIOS), then I see the  
FreeBSD bootloader flash by, followed by an imediate restart.
Strange... Tried a couple of times, same result.
So, I thought it could be some hardware problems, so I pulled the  
card and disk, and plugged them in to an old IBM Aptiva (Pentium II  
300Mhz, no idea what mobo it has), and booted the CD.. No problems at  
all! Booted fine both with and without the disk attached:

...
atapci1: <Promise PDC40518 SATA150 controller> port 0x7800-0x787f, 
0x7c00-0x7cff mem 0x80120000-0x80120fff,0x80140000-0x8015ffff irq11  
at device 15.0 on pci0
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci1
ata4: <ATA channel 2> on atapci1
ata5: <ATA channel 3> on atapci1
...
ad10: 35304MB <WDC WD360GD-00FLA1 27.08D27> at ata5-master SATA150



Okay, nicenice, no problem.. So there probably is some hardware  
problem.. But what? Anyone got any experience with this kind of  
hardware?

Tried another thing, put the card back in the XP3200+, and booted  
without a disk connected.
Connected the disk after boot, with the following results:



ata9: CONNNECTED
ad18: 35304MB <WDC360GD-00FLA1 27.08D27> at ata9-master SATA150
subdisk18: detached
ad18: detached
ata9: DISCONNECTED


Nice! Seems i could plug it in and out in the Promise as much as I  
wanted, but when I tried the on-board SATA, it gave me a kernel panic:


ata2: CONNECT REQUESTED
ata2: CONNECTED
ata2: CONNECT REQUESTED
ad4: 35304MB <WDC360GD-00FLA1 27.08D27> at ata2-master SATA150
ata2: CONNECTED
unknown: req=0xc2abd708 ATA_IDENTIFY semaphore timeout !! DANGER Will  
Robinson!!

 >>>here it switched to first console<<<

Uptime: 4m3s
Cannot dump. no dump device devined.
Automatic reboot in 15 sec....


Something seems not to work that good with my mobo... Not that I  
realy care for the moment...

So, my problem seems to be to get FreeBSD running with a disc  
connected at boot, in my XP3200.
The "real" server is an XP1900 on an Asus A7V333 (KT333 chipset), but  
I'd rather don't bring it down just to test... But I guess i have to  
sooner or later...

Anyway, does anyone have any clue why the machine won't boot with the  
disc connected?

Thanks!


Johan Ström
johan at stromnet.org
http://www.stromnet.org/