BTX Loader hang with ICH6R in RAID mode

[Mark Kane]

Hi everyone,

I've got a Supermicro P8SC8 board with an ICH6R SATA controller and am
trying to install FreeBSD on a RAID1 on this controller. Booting
FreeBSD 9, 8, 7, or 6 i386 disc1 when the controller is in RAID mode
results in a hang at the BTX loader:

-------------------------------------
Boot from CD :
CD Loader 1.2

Building the boot loader arguments
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER... Found
Relocating the loader and the BTX
Starting the BTX loader

BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.08
Consoles: internal video/keyboard
BIOS CD is cd0
_ (continues to blink indefinitely)
-------------------------------------

If the SATA mode is set to IDE instead of RAID in the BIOS, it boots
normally with no problem. I've also tried disabling ACPI as a test but
there was no change.

Any suggestions on what else to try would be much appreciated.
Unfortunately the box is remote and it takes quite a bit of
time/expense for remote hands to power cycle the machine or swap discs
after each attempt.

Thanks in advance!

-Mark

[John Baldwin]

Post by Mark Kane
Hi everyone,
I've got a Supermicro P8SC8 board with an ICH6R SATA controller and am
trying to install FreeBSD on a RAID1 on this controller. Booting
FreeBSD 9, 8, 7, or 6 i386 disc1 when the controller is in RAID mode
-------------------------------------
CD Loader 1.2
Building the boot loader arguments
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER... Found
Relocating the loader and the BTX
Starting the BTX loader
BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.08
Consoles: internal video/keyboard
BIOS CD is cd0
_ (continues to blink indefinitely)
-------------------------------------
If the SATA mode is set to IDE instead of RAID in the BIOS, it boots
normally with no problem. I've also tried disabling ACPI as a test but
there was no change.
Any suggestions on what else to try would be much appreciated.
Unfortunately the box is remote and it takes quite a bit of
time/expense for remote hands to power cycle the machine or swap discs
after each attempt.
Thanks in advance!

Hmm, these things are generally not very easy to debug, esp. remotely. :(

It sounds like your BIOS is doing something unusual and that is why BTX
hangs. Are you able to PXE boot this box from another machine to install it?

[Mark Kane]

Post by John Baldwin
Hmm, these things are generally not very easy to debug, esp.
remotely. :(
It sounds like your BIOS is doing something unusual and that is why
BTX hangs. Are you able to PXE boot this box from another machine to
install it?

Thanks for the reply and PXE boot idea. Unfortunately I think that's
going to be a little too involved for this case as this particular
machine is not on a LAN with DHCP.

At this point since it's quite difficult to continue to debug remotely,
I think we might just go with using the two drives in IDE mode and a
gmirror for the OS, and have additional storage via a 3ware card.

Thanks again!

-Mark