Help needed w/ HighPoint RocketRAID 3120 on FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE

[Michael Powell]

Jeremy Gagliardi wrote:

> I'm having trouble with HighPoint RocketRAID 3120 on FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE.
> 
> I have 2 disks on it in a mirror configuration.  Everything seems to go
> swimmingly through the FreeBSD installation, up until the final reboot...
> 
> 1) Boot from Disc 1.
> 2) At the "Welcome to FreeBSD" screen, choose option "6"
> ok load hptiop
> ok boot
> 3) It recognizes my mirror as device "da0" and I proceed with the
> installation.
> 4) I install all distros, except X.org & Ports.
> 5) At the tail end, before rebooting, I enter a shell and vi
> /boot/loader.conf.  I add the line:
> hptiop_load="YES"
> 6) REBOOT.
> 
> The following happens...
> a) RocketRAID card beeps
> b) I see the BIOS splash screen
> c) I see RocketRAID splash screen
> d) It resets and repeats everything above.
> 
> I never even get a boot loader menu to try troubleshooting.
> 
> What did I miss?  Why can't this thing boot?  Unfortunately, HighPoint's
> User Manual was last updated in 2007, when FreeBSD 6.1 was the latest.
> Since then, the hptiop driver was added to 7.x, and that's what I'm trying
> to use.  To be clear, the problem isn't that I can get FreeBSD to mount
> and recognize it, I can.  The problem is being able to boot from it.
> 
[snip]

In your motherboard BIOS is there any entry that controls which controller
boots first? If so set it to boot from the add-in card first instead of the
onboard controller. Also ensure that in the Highpoint card BIOS INT 13 is 
"on", should be this way by default.

-Mike