Help with Booting

[Doug Hardie]

On 23 April 2011, at 12:45, Michael L. Squires wrote:

> I haven't seen a verbose dmesg output booting from a non-RAID hard drive.
> 
> I have 7.4-STABLE working on several multi-CPU Opteron systems, but they are all Tyan motherboards.  Are Rioworks/Arima still in business?

I believe so.  Their web page is there, but mostly in Chinese.

> 
> Rather than use the on-board controllers I've just bought some of the LSI 300-8X PCI-X RAID controllers which are cheap and work very well with SATA 2 drives (and FreeBSD).  The Adaptec 2610 series are even cheaper, but they
> are only SATA 1.

These boxes have no additional room for expansion cards.  They have 4 apparently hot-swappable drives in the front.