5.3R and 3ware 9500s hang

[Joseph]

hello there's.

i'm building a new machine to run freebsd 5.3 with two 3ware 9500s-12MI cards. i
installed the OS before i connected the drives, and since i have connected them,
the system hangs on boot. the system also hangs on boot directly from the
install cd with the drives connected. i have only a cd drive connected to the
onboard ide, no floppy, and the onboard scsi is disabled via jumper.

other hardware is: supermicro X6DH8-XG2 motherboard (E7520 chipset), two 3.6GHz
xeon, 4GB ram, two 36gb 10k sata drives mirrored, and 12x 300gb sata drives.
there's also an IPMI card, but it's likely irrelevant to this question.

i've already cvsup'ed and installed 5.3R-p2 and a new kernel (with the carp
patches). i can boot in safe mode and operate fine, but with only one cpu. i've
disabled ACPI in device.hints (can't boot with ACPI enabled), and i've tried
setting the following in loader.conf, which i read is the same as safe mode:

hw.ata.ata_dma=0
hw.ata.atapi_dma=0
hw.ata.wc=0
hw.eisa_slots=0

i've tried using the twa.ko from 3ware, both release and development, and using
the sources to compile a kernel, which fails at twa compilation.

both 3ware cards have the same bios and firmware, which are:
Firmware FE9X 2.04.00.005, BIOS BE9X 2.03.01.047

during verbose boot, the last part of the messages are:

ata1: reiniting channel ..
ata1: reset tp1 mask=03 ostat0=50 ostat1=01
ata1-master: stat=0x00 err=0x01 lsb=0x14 msb=0xeb
ata1-slave:  stat=0x01 err=0x04 lsb=0x04 msb=0x7f
ata1: reset tp2 stat0=00 stat1=01 devices=0x4<ATAPI_MASTER>
ata1: resetting done ..
ata1: reiniting channel ..
ata1-master: FAILURE - ATAPI_IDENTIFY timed out
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): error 5
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retries Exhausted
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): error 5
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retries Exhausted
ata1: reiniting channel ..
ata1-master: FAILURE - ATAPI_IDENTIFY timed out
ata1: device config done ..
ata1-master: FAILURE - ATAPI_IDENTIFY timed out
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): CAM Status 0x39
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retrying Command
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): error 5
(probe15:twa0:0:16:0): Retries Exhausted
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): error 5
(probe31:twa1:0:16:0): Retries Exhausted


any helpful information is appreciated.

thanks!
joe