dump card state: amd64 + 300G seagate + Adaptec AIC7902 + 5.3-stable

[Scott Long]

Mike Hunter wrote:

> On Feb 01, "Scott Long" wrote:
> 
> 
>>Ade Lovett wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Scott Long wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>The firmware on two of those drives is dangerouly old and broken.  I'd
>>>>suggest contacting Seagate for an update, and keep a fire extinguisher
>>>>and some holy water nearby until they are upgraded.
>>>
>>>Newer firmware doesn't make any difference to this particular problem.
>>>
>>>The combination of U320, Adaptec, Seagate, and ahd is very, very prone 
>>>to weird and wonderful warnings, errors, failures, lockups, and general 
>>>crapness.
>>>
>>>Somewhat unsurprisingly, things seem to be significantly worse with 
>>>integrated aic7902 chipsets on the motherboard, than with the equivalent 
>>>PCI-X cards.
>>>
>>>By all means update the firmware -- particularly in this case -- but 
>>>don't expect it to be the Holy Grail.  You *might* get lucky, but the 
>>>odds are significantly stacked against you.
>>
>>Some versions of the Adaptec U320 chips work better with cables, and
>>some work better with backplanes.  In general, none work well with
>>anything that isn't very simple and clean.  68->80 pin converters are
>>very problematic, for example, as are cable->backplane junctions.  In
>>any case, whomever at Seagate tech support is making wild claims about
>>64-bit support and FreeBSD should be ignored.
> 
> 
> Thanks to everybody for their replies.  I will plan to get firmware from
> seagate and flash all the drives.  I'm downloading knoppix to use
> seagate's utility...or will it work under fbsd?  (It's a moot point since I
> have a amd64 build without 32bit abi compat.)
> 
> Is it possible to flash the onboard adaptec "card"?  I haven't found any
> info on how to do that if it is.
> 
> Sucks to be me!
> 
> Mike

The Adaptec SCSI controllers don't have an on-board firmware.  BIOS
updates and the associated flash tools are available from the website.

Scott