Install 5.4 CD, Adaptec 2120S, aac0: Command <hex> Timeouts

[Glen Van Lehn]

Hi,  I'm new to the list, but have been using BSD for five+ years.

I tried installing 5-STABLE from the 5.4CDs onto a new HP DL140 G2 with an Adaptec 2120S RAID controller that someone else had already installed with a Linux OS. Two HDD are config'd as RAID1 set.  After the probes for VGA & mouse, the boot stuck on a repeated series of messages:

aac0: COMMAND 0xc39ef000 TIMEOUT AFTER xxx SECONDS
# 16 diff hex offsets per set .. each set repeating every 20 seconds
aac0: COMMAND 0xc39ef708 TIMEOUT AFTER xxx SECONDS

A different boot has a different hex prefix, 0xc3a16, but the same sequence of 16 trailing digits, 000 to 708.

Searching this list, I found a similar post from Chris Knight in January, but he was on 6 and that was apparently right at a change to the aac driver.  Searching FreeBSD.org turned up a similar problem back in March 2004 [5.2.1].   Scott Long responded to that one as a known issue being resolved.  The BIOS firmware was 'Build 7244' from May 2004, but I updated that to Build 8205 [latest for that chipset] and still had the same problem.


Would the pre-existing different OS install mess up the aac0 driver?  like format the array first?
I broke the array, re-inited the disks and recreated RAID 1..  but didn't format drives ..  still had problem.

something else?    I was able to install Fedora4 after failing on 5.4, but I'd like to use FreeBSD for this project.

comments appreciated.

glen van lehn