HP NetRAID 1Si trouble

[Jon Falconer]

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to recycle an old HP NetServer LC2000r P3/733 with 256MB RAM.
It's been running MS Win2K for several years with no problems, but has
become too slow for that task. I need to setup an email server for
faculty/staff/students to do authenticated sending of email, seemed a
perfect fit. So I started installing FreeBSD 6.0-Release like I've done
many times before. After committing the changes, newfs claims to have
succeeded for all partitions. But while extracting the install files it
does not make the usual progress and fails with "Write failure on
transfer! (wrote -1 bytes of 1425408 bytes)". Pressing alt-F2 shows the
following messages:

/stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
/stand/cpio: warning: skipped 1024 bytes of junk
/stand:cpio: :No such file or directory

    ...  <many sets of the above messages> ...

/stand/gunzip: <fd:0>: invalid stored block lengths
/stand/cpio: premature end of file

I've installed 6.0-Release on several other computers with this same CD so
I think the CD is good. The system is booting ok from the CD so I would
think that the CD drive is ok.

I've updated the firmware on the 1Si card from F.02.05 to F.02.09, the
latest I could find on HP's web site. I tried to install FBSD 5.4-Release
with the same results. I ran a memory test, and it made three passes of
eleven different test with no problems found. I installed 5.4-Release on
an HP lp1000r with a NetRAID controller several months ago and it is
working fine. 

I've run out of ideas of what to try next. Does anyone else have any
suggestions?

Thanks for your time,

Jon