Raid / Dual booting / Really need help.

[Eric Murphy]

Hey guys -- First off let me give you inisght on my hardware.

CPU: 3400 AMD 64
MB: Asus A8n-SLI Deluxe
Video: Nvidia  6600 GT
Ram: 3gigs Crucial
HD: (2) SATA Hitachi 80gig Drives
RAID:  ONBOARD: Silicon Image Sil 1334 Raid Controller
           ONBOARD: Nvidia Southbridge Raid Controller


My Problem:

Well it all started when I decided to dual boot my system with Windows Xp, And FreeBSD 5.4.  Installing Windows was no problem.  It went flawless.  When I got to installing FreeBSD 5.4 I had noticed that it was not detecting my Silicon 1334 Raid Controller. And was just showing my 2 Hard Drives (ad4 and ad6)  I decided to go ahead and install anyway and setting the boot mgr on BOTH drives. (Just like the hand book says)  Well I rebooted, and the boot manager loads.  Windows boots just fine, but BSD on the other hand does not.  I get a NOT UFS  no /kernel Error.  Now it seems to me that it cant find the mount points or the kernel on the disk.  I think this is caused by a non dectected raid controller.  My next step was to disable the Silicon Image 1334 Raid controller and try useing the Nvidia one.  I repeated the SAME steps as above and recieved the same error messages.  My next thought was maybe 5.4 did not support either of my raid controllers. So I decided to search the web.. turns out some people got it working, most didnt (Go figure the ones that did get it working did not say how).  So I did the only thing I could do and try out FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT.  I started again with my Silicon 1334 Raid controller.  Again I had no success and FreeBSD did NOT detect my controller.  So I had the same resalts.  (Not UFS, no /kernel)  So this time, as you could guess I tryed the Nvidia controller.  This time however, upon booting the install I noticed that FreeBSD did in fact detect my nvidia controller! During the FDISK install step I now had (ad4, ad6 AND ar0).  So I went ahead and installed the packages I wanted and had thought I found a solution to my problem!  Well it turns out that 6.0 does not come with the ports tree OR Xorg.  So now im confused - I do not know how to proceed from here.  I also was wondering if there was a way to load the driver for my Nvidia raid controller on my 5.4 installation.  So my question comes down to this:

How can I get this working with 5.4 (prehaps by loading a driver?) and if I cant, how can I get 6.0 up and running with everything I need. Also can anyone confirm that these raid controllers ARE or ARE NOT supported.

Thanks for reading - and if anyone has ANY suggestions PLEASE respond.  Ive already poured my heart out at bsdforums.org haha.

-Eric