3ware 9550SX RAID Card Problems w/ FreeBSD 5.5

[Ramsey Tantawi]

Hi,

I have a Dell Poweredge 1800, and was previously using FreeBSD 5.4
booted from a LSI MegaRAID SATA card.  Things worked fine.  However,
this machine is going into production as a email server, so I
purchased a 3ware 9550SX-4LP card to use instead of the LSI.

I installed the 3ware card and configured it w/ the BIOS utility:
default options, with 2 x 250GB drives set up in a RAID 1, with one
hot spare. Then came to install FreeBSD 5.5 on it.  The install CD saw
the drive fine, and I set up partitions and such, but when it came
time to write settings and perform the installation, I got a "Error:
Cannot write to disk da0", and install failed.

The 3ware page says that for 5.4 and 6.0 a kernel module must be
loaded separately (or the kernel recompiled), but as 5.5 includes the
updated twa driver I didn't think this was necessary.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Ramsey