Gigabyte GA-VM900M caveats

Bruce M. Simpson bms at incunabulum.net
Wed May 23 02:47:56 UTC 2007


Daniel,

Thanks for the affirmation that I'm not alone in this. The whole point 
of RAID being supported by platform firmware is to facilitate booting 
from it even if disks fail.

Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> On a somewhat related note..
> In my experience V-RAID is utter crap - if one of your disks fails in a 
> RAID1 array and you reboot it will give you 2 options - erase the first 
> part of your disk and boot, or sit and do nothing.
>
> When I asked my motherboard vendor about this they suggested I switch to 
> SATA mode (to boot off one disk) or to put another disk in and 
> rebuild... Not exactly good for unattended use.
>   

Summary: Avoid VIA software RAID like the plague.

The BIOS (after latest update from Gigabyte) consistently reports that 
duplication failed whenever I attempted to [re]create the mirror in the 
BIOS.  Even when I tried to switch the controller to SATA mode, the 
second disk persisted in being undetected. I removed the primary disk 
entirely. The secondary disk DID get mirrored, and the BIOS attempted to 
boot from it; although by the time I did this I had no way of verifying 
if FreeBSD had mirrored the data, or if the BIOS mirrored the data.

FreeBSD never sees the second disk, whether in SATA or RAID mode, and 
setting the array to 'bootable' in the BIOS does not help in any case. 
Short of manually nuking the metadata on the disks themselves, I can 
think of no other clean room tactics, and the supplied documentation is 
also useless.

Yes, utter crap, and a waste of valuable time.

What I plan to do tommorrow is swap the JMicron card out of my Athlon64 
machine and into the new Core 2 Duo system I began building. In a way 
this is good because the disks I purchased support SATA-300 as does the 
JMicron. However, FreeBSD's support for the onboard Acer Labs SATA on 
that system appeared to have regressed during the 6.1->6.2 lifetime due 
to an AHCI issue (see thread: 6.2-RC: Problem with SATA on ASUS Vintage 
AH-3, on this list).

[Normally I have been running 7-CURRENT on that machine, with the 
JMicron card, so up until now this hasn't been an issue, but this is 
what kicked off the whole shooting match in the first place, and I need 
to be able to multi-boot Windows "Longhorn" Server and Gentoo Linux for 
the work I'm going to be doing.]

I wonder if people have had better experiences with JMicron. I am 
encouraged by the work Scott Long has begun, although that is going to 
take time to bear fruit. I can't burn too much time on this though, I 
needed a working server today.

Regards,
BMS


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