Problems with promise SATA300 TX2Plus

[Michael Proto]

Jisakiel wrote:
> Greetings. I was trying to install FreeBSD 7 on an old machine to make it a fileserver. Machine is an AMD K7 1200 on an Abit AN-7 mobo (nforce2 400), which has booted Freebsd 7.0 RC1 beforehand (for testing ZFS; only ACPI didn't work as it hung it).
> 
> I recently bought a PCI SATA card on the cheap variety, Promise SATA300 TX2Plus, and a couple of 500GB Maxtors. Unfortunately, when any hard drive (both of the 500's and an older 250 Maxtor which I use) is plugged to the SATA ports of the pci card I get an instantaneous reboot when trying to boot the bootonly cd (it doesn't reach the bootloader). If no disks are plugged it works but hangs while booting (with ACPI disabled). 
> 
> Things I tried: 
> 
> - Booting another OS. Card works perfectly both in linux (2.6.24) and windows, with the two hard drives visible. 
> - Leaving just one SATA drive connected to the whole system through the PCI card. It doesn't matter which drive I let, both the 250G and the 500G make it reboot. 
> - Swapping the power cable. 
> - Unplugging my former 2 drives to ease the load on the Enermax 365W power supply. It works in Windows though, with everything on... 
> - Disabling both integrated SATA of the motherboard (SI3112 which works both in linux and freebsd), and integrated firewire (just in case). 
> - Moving the PCI card to another slot. I only have another pci device, a soundcard, and moving it changed the bios boot order (first the pci, then the integrated sata or viceversa) with no change at all afterwards. 
> - Trying 6.3 livecd. Same insta-reboot. 
> - Updating the card's bios. There is no newer one, 1.0.0.34 is what came and what's on the promise web. 
> 
> Is there any way to make this card work on FreeBSD 7, or anything else that I could try? I bought it specifically for that; I might be in time to return it, though I'd have to buy another one on the same price range then (perhaps Promise FastTrak TX2300, HightPoint RocketRaid 1520 or Adaptec 1210SA which I seem to recall that doesn't work too well on linux). Otherwise I'd be more than willing to help debugging it ^^. 
> 
> Thanks everybody... 
> 
> 
> jisakiel at yahoo.es
> 

For what its worth, I have a RocketRaid 1520 in my fileserver at home
that I've been using for over a year without any problems:

atapci0: <HighPoint HPT372N UDMA133 controller> port
0xff00-0xff07,0xfe00-0xfe03
,0xfd00-0xfd07,0xfc00-0xfc03,0xec00-0xecff irq 17 at device 8.0 on pci0
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci0
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci0
...
ad4: 286168MB <Seagate ST3300831AS 3.03> at ata2-master UDMA133
ad6: 286168MB <Seagate ST3300831AS 3.03> at ata3-master UDMA133
ar0: 286168MB <HighPoint v2 RocketRAID RAID1> status: READY


-Proto