FreeBSD 8.3-R sysinstall does not "see" disks that are recognized during boot

[Daniel O'Connor]

On 18/04/2012, at 7:32, Andy Dills wrote:
> I've got a new supermicro server I'm trying to get FreeBSD on. It uses the 
> Intel c602 chipset, and it's my understanding that support for that 
> chipset (c60X) was recently added via the isci driver. Ok, great, that 
> explains why 8.2-R and 9.0-R didn't see the drives.
> 
> So, I grabbed the memstick image of 8.3-RELEASE that is on the ftp server, 
> booted it up, and sure enough, as the dmesg scrolls I see it now properly 
> recognizes da0 and da1, as it should (the memstick is da2). It sees the 
> disks fine at this point, everything looks good.
> 
> However, once the system finishes booting and loads into sysinstall, and I 
> go to partition the drives, I get "No disks found! Please verify that your 
> disk controller is being properly loaded at boot time".
> 
> Any suggestions for avenues to troubleshoot this?  I have pictures to 
> document if it helps.
> 
> Seems very odd. I confirmed the behavior with the SATA set to IDE, AHCI, 
> and RAID modes. (The drives were recognized as da0 and da1 during bootup 
> in all three modes, but not by sysinstall.)


That does seem very odd - if they appear as daX then sysinstall should see them.

Can you go into the holographic shell (or livecd if you have it) and run..
echo /dev/da*
echo >/dev/da0
echo >/dev/da1

(this will trash the first sector of da0 and da1 but I assume that's OK since you're installing on those).

If you could obtain a KLD for isci built for 9.0 you could load it in the loader and see if that installer sees it, you might not have the facilities for that though..

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
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