Re: Help needed w/ HighPoint RocketRAID 3120 on FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE

ThinkDifferently wrote:
[snip]
Gigabyte's tech support guy was a whole lot more helpful, but in the end
he
couldn't get it to work either. His working theory is that since the
motherboard has its own RAID controller (even if it's disabled), it may be
interfering with the RocketRAID's ability to intervene using the same
mechanism (called Interrupt 13). I even upgraded the RocketRAID's
firmware
in an attempt to get it working. Nothing changed the situation.

The only other thing is if you can disable INT 13 boot in the motherboard
BIOS so as to leave the one on the HighPoint card the only one active. You
would still change the below to "Bootable Add-in Cards".

The theory does explain this though:

In my BIOS there is the following...
Hard Disk Boot Priority [Press Enter]
1. SCSI-0: : RocketRAID 3120 SATA C
2. Bootable Add-in Cards

The RocketRAID card should not be showing up here on line 1 as SCSI-0. I
was initially very confused when I saw this, but this would match the
Gigabyte tech guys theory. This line should only be involving devices
on the 1rst controller, e.g. the mobo one.

So, my working theory is that this RocketRAID is not compatible with my
motherboard and vice versa. In fact, I checked Highpoint's web site, and
they have a motherboard support list. It is in fact an astonishingly tiny
list, mostly (w)Intel boards, and quite obscure. A very small niche.

Could very well be the case. If they have the INT13 hardwired in the BIOS
to only try to boot from the 1rst (onboard controller) it won't look for
an mbr anywhere else, even when told to boot from the add in card. This
would be a fairly extreme oversight as the ability to boot from external
add in cards was added a long long time ago. I've been doing such things
successfully for years. This would be really crappy BIOS design on
Gigabyte's part. Hell if I had another motherboard to run the experiment
on and prove the hypothesis I'd be tempted to return the motherboard! :-)

I have very little patience when there's a 15 day return policy. %-O

Roger that!

-Mike



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