5.4 Installer + Promise FT100TX2 = Loader crash

[Doug White]

On Sun, 26 Jun 2005, Mark Kirkwood wrote:

> Daniel O'Connor wrote:
>
> >
> > I find even disconnecting the drives so no RAID is detected works - ie it's
> > not the presence of the card per se that is a problem.
> >
>
> Good test - I had not tried that.
>
> In addition, I can confirm your observation that merely deleting the
> array makes the loader work reliably again.

Try:

. Zero off the first megabyte or so of the subdisks with dd or similar
  tool.
. Force an array initialize from the controller BIOS. Wait for it to
  finish.
. Install some other OS that recognizes the array, write the MBR and
  partition table, then install FreeBSD over it.

Some controller BIOSen have been known to peek at the DOS partition table,
and it may be jumping off into space if its seeing half a table from one
disk, or something like that. These actions should blow away any bogus
underlying data.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org