FreeBSD not booting after RAID array rebuild

[Bob Ababurko]

Hello-

I am working on getting a box running with a NetRAID 3 (D4943) card.  I 
have had a few issues so far, so I am hoping that I can work through 
this one as well.

Ok, the setup is this, I have the card(D4943), Biostar M7VIG 400 mobo, 
(4) WD 9.15GB 10k U2W LVD SCSI  drives, three of which are in RAID 5 and 
the last being a hotspare set to auto rebuild.  The OS is 
installed(freebsd 5.4) and running on the array.  At first I had trouble 
getting the card to boot, but I had to set the option to standard MBR in 
the install as opposed to none, which I am used to using for PC 
hardware.  The box boots fine, but the problem comes in when a drive is 
failed.

I failed a drive on purpose to make sure that this card is gonna work 
and how I was going to deal with a failed drive.  What I did to test was 
shut the box down and unplug one of the drives from the RAID5 volume.  I 
booted the box back up and the alarm started going off and the HS drive 
light went on telling me that is was rebuilding...I also checked in the 
RAID card utility and it also said the drive was rebuilding.  I could 
not get the computer to boot into the OS when the card was rebuilding. I 
was under the impression that I would have a accessible system, just in 
a degraded performance mode.  When the drive was done rebuilding and the 
volume back to optimum(shown in Raid Utility), I booted the system and 
everything looks good until the OS starts to boot.  When the dash starts 
to spin the box reboots itself.  This is at least telling me that 
something is accessed in the array, but something is making it reboot.

I did another test on a running box at a login prompt.  A drive in array 
unplugged and then the alarm goes off and hotspare starts t rebuild. 
Another problem is that I cannot log in.  I enter user/passwd and hear 
drive activity when I press enter, but no login.  I just keeps giving me 
a login prompt until an error pops up saying that getty is being run to 
fast and is going to sleep for 30s.  After rebuild still not boot.

If anyone has any idea what is happening here, I would love to hear as I 
am spending mucho time on this already and would like to at least know 
what I can or cannot do to fix this.

TIA,
Bob