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

[Mike Hunter]

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