VIA RAID controller problem

[Orestis Papakonstantinou]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Orestis Papakonstantinou <orspap at gmail.com>
Date: Nov 16, 2005 1:11 PM
Subject: Re: VIA RAID controller problem
To: Marcin Simonides <marcin at studio4plus.com>

The problem in my situation is that I am using a laptop. That means that
whether I use RAID 0/1 or just JBOD is the same thing because everything
passes through that RAID controller. It is completely embedded to the
system. My BIOS does not even know that I am using RAID or if it does, it
hasn't got any configuration settings, so that FreeBSD could "look" through
the BIOS. Things get even more complicated if you consider that my laptop
hasn't got a floppy drive. Because even the existing VIA RAID drivers for
Linux are released as an iso for a floppy to be booted from the kernel. So
on a second thought I really cant use FreeBSD on that laptop unless these
drivers are supported in a future release version (embedded to the kernel on
boot-time). So if any FreeBSD developers are reading this, I would be
grateful if they could embed this RAID controller driver in a future
release. Thanks for replying.

On 11/16/05, Marcin Simonides <marcin at studio4plus.com> wrote:
>
> Orestis Papakonstantinou wrote:
>
> > I recently purchased a laptop (Amilo M3438G) that uses VIA's VT6421 RAID
> > controller. I have problem installing FreeBSD (6.0) on that laptop
> because
> [...]
> > compatibility layer after the install). Has anyone with similar hardware
>
> > found a solution? Thanks for your time!
>
> I'm using a similar VIA VT6420 with FreeBSD 6.0 though the system is
> installed on a single IDE disk and only uses VIA's RAID for /usr.
>
> I've had problems with RAID0 (I'm going to post more information soon, I
> need to make a few tests), but I think RAID1 should work fine (I haven't
> tried).
> --
> Marcin Simonides
>