ICH5R, ICH7R or Promise PDC20378 RAID?

[Philippe Lang]

owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I wasn't as lucky as Doug with my ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe board,
> both with the ICH5R and Promise RAID controller.
> 
> 1) With the Promise controller, after simulating a disk
> problem (shutdown - disk disconnection - reboot - shutdown -
> disk reconnection - reboot), I wasn't able to rebuild the
> array at all, either with "atacontrol rebuild ar0" or from
> the bios. I suspect a spare disk is necessary for a complete rebuild.
> 
> 2) With the ICH5R controller, installation went fine too. If
> I disconnect a disk, the system still boots, but when I plug
> the disk back (computer shut down), no boot is possible
> anymore. At boot, a kernel panic says:
> "softdep_setup_inomapdep". No array rebuild is possible from
> the bios, so I'm stuck.
> 
> 
> I use freebsd 6.1 RELEASE, with the latest BIOS for the
> motherboard, and
> 2 SATA 1.0 Western Digital 160GB disks. I'm trying to
> configure RAID 1.
> 
> I'm surprised I have so many problems. Am I doing anything
> wrong? With INTEL hardware controllers for SCSI disks, I
> never had any problems until now. Does anyone successfully
> use another ASUS board, and is able to rebuild the array,
> without rebooting?
> 
> Thanks for your time,

I have made some further tests with another ASUS board, with an INTEL
ICH7R chipset. Installation of FreeBSD 6.1 went fine. I shut down the
computer, disconnect a disk, reboot, and... And no reboot at all. Kernel
panic.

The ar raid driver seems to be very buggy... I'm looking forward to
receiving my 3WARE RAID controllers...

---------------
Philippe Lang
Attik System