Compaq 1850R panics with 5.x

[Guy Silliman]

well I might have some insight into this mystery....

I am currently running with a less then fully populated drive cage... I 
have 2 of the 3 1 inch 9.1gb drives in place.  I have had them placed in 
the slot 0 and slot 1 position.  And win2k server loaded fine but fbsd 
did not see the drives.

On a hunch - I just moved the drives up so that the empty spot is slot 0 
and the 2 drives are in slots 1 and 2... 4.7R saw the drives.  4.9R does 
not.  Now I am new to this chassis - I don't know if I am supposed to 
have a blank in this empty slot - but it will not matter ot me in the 
long run, as I have another 9.1gb drive on its way to fill the empty 
spot.. I just hope I do not have a buggy backplane.

Guy

Per olof Ljungmark wrote:

> Guy Silliman wrote:
>
>> I am trying to get a Compaq 1850R running.  It is a dual PII 400MHz 
>> machine that works fine with Win2k server... but
>> I would prefer to use fbsd 5.x but I am stumped by this panic at 
>> sysinstall. I have searched all the lists and have tried several 
>> fixes mentioned including the "Full table - Mapped" and OS set to 
>> Win2k in the BIOS. I have tried disabling the onboard NIC as a 
>> possible source of conflicts but no luck.
>>
>> I would be willing to go with a late 4.x but it does not probe the 
>> onboard SCSI  thus I have no drives.
>> I do have a Smart Array 3200 ordered and coming - this may solve the 
>> 4.x issue, but I am puzzled by the panic with 5.x.
>>
> FWIW, I had identical problems with two 1850's, one PII400 single CPU 
> and one PII450 dual. Both are now running fine with 4.9-REL, the first 
> with a SmartArray 221 and the second with a Smart Array 3200.
>
> There has been a few problems apparently with the sym driver for the 
> built in SCSI and I'm not using it in either. For instance, I had this 
> problem in 4.8-REL:
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/52331
> where I had 8 drives but only 4 visible.
>
> I tend to agree with another poster that there are changes between the 
> PII and PIII 1850 motherboards that makes the formar fail with 5.1 and 
> the latter is ok.
>
> just my $0.02
>