Promise ATA100 controller and 160G disks

[Bill Moran]

Stijn Hoop wrote:
> On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 09:28:09AM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:
> 
>>Stijn Hoop wrote:
>>
>>>does anyone know if the Promise ATA100 controller PCI card supports 160 G
>>>disks on -STABLE?
>>
>>I'm not 100% sure that the Promise controller is the problem here:
>>http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2004-May/046070.html
> 
> Hmm, not good.
> 
> However, I have misworded my question I guess -- I wanted to know whether
> those drives _could_ work in that configuration; I did not want to buy
> non-working drives (I'd have gone for 120G if they didn't work, however I'm
> reasonably sure now that it'll work).
> 
> Based on your problems I'll stay away from buying a Samsung drive right now,
> even though it might not be the real problem. Thanks for the feedback.

Don't know if that's the problem or not, but I guess it's as good as I can do
with advice right now.

I'm pretty damn frustrated with the current problem, myself.

>>Earlier this week, I thought I'd solved the problem: I partitioned the drive
>>in a different computer, and it seemed to be OK in one of the machines where
>>it previously wouldn't work.
>>
>>I then partitioned a second drive and sent them both off with the client to
>>be installed in the server at the colo site.  Apon installation, the system
>>hung (as described in the email) ... I don't know what the hell is going on
>>at this point, and it's incredibly frustrating because I'm not even sure how
>>to proceed with fixing it.
> 
> We had a Linux machine here a few weeks ago that wouldn't boot; turned out the
> memory had gone faulty but we only discovered that after running memtest86 for
> over 24 hours (having passed lots of tests it suddenly reported failures).  It
> wasn't a case of overheating because it consistently failed to boot; it just
> took memtest lots and lots of repeats to get the problem to show.
> 
> Anyway I don't know if it's related to your problem but my point is that you
> never suspect the right component in the case of hardware failures :(

Good point.  If I were fixing the correct problem, it still wouldn't be a
problem.

I still think it's related to the HDDs though, as the machine had 60+ days
uptime without the drives, then wouldn't boot with them, and is now back up
and running without them.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com