Problem with s5000PAL using a SRCS16 in Raid 5 with 5 * 500gig drives

[Paul]

Hello,

Does anyone have any suggestions how to better diagnose this problem?

I have installed a trimmed down custom kernel with a rebuild of the 
latest stable version and it did not make a difference.

It would be great to get to the bottom of the reason for the odd 
freezing from time to time as the system is not "stable" in its current state.

What tools do people use to diagnose such problems as I have never 
had this problem in Freebsd?

Thanks,

Paul

>I have been having troubles installing the amd64 platform on an 
>Intel S5000pal system with the SRCS16 Raid controller using Raid 5 
>with 5 * 500gig drives.
>
>In order to get it to install I had to split the raid setup into two 
>logical arrays. I guess it was too close to the 2TB limit as it was 
>giving me read sector error when booting.
>
>However I now have it booting but it gets stuck at the
>
>Attempting to mount / (the root partition).
>
>This goes on for like 20 minutes and then it finally proceeds. This 
>seems odd and clearly is a problem to mount the small / root 
>partition that is only a few gigs big.
>
>Does anyone have an idea what is going on here?
>
>I also noticed it with adding a user it added the user but got stuck 
>for like 10 minutes before proceeding.
>
>This system has 16GIG of ram using the amd64 platform and has 2 dual 
>core cps running.
>
>I installed the centos just to see if there were any problems with 
>this operating system (in case this was hardware related) but it 
>worked 100% without any fuss. The problem is I want to use Freebsd 
>:) So I do not believe this is hardware related.
>
>If anyone reading this has set  up a S5000PAL system can they let me 
>know what settings they used to have a successful installation?