[rhn-users] Iwill DK88 hangs randomly during init with sata raid card

[David A. Ranch]

The first place I would start is by disabling the APIC (IRQ routing),
ACPI (power management [and other things]), and SMP.  You can do that by
adding "noapic noacpi nosmp" at the Grub/Lilo boot line.  If things
start to work, re-add one option at a time and then doing combinations
until you find the problem option.  If this gets things working, at
least you'll have a starting point to troubleshoot this more.  If that
doesn't help, I would then try moving the controller to a different slot
and see if that makes a difference (usually will use a different IRQ). 

--David

Benj FitzPatrick wrote:
> Hello all,
> I have a DK88 (1.30 bios), 3ware 9550 sata raid, onboard
> nvidia sata (JBOD), and RHEL 4 for amd64.  The problem is only
> with the smp kernel (2.6.9-34), though the only UP kernel I
> have tried is 2.6.9-5.  The problem I have had when the raid
> card is installed is that the computer will randomly stop
> while booting.  Usually it begins during the "checking for new
> hardware".  On a problem free boot it will take 4-5 seconds at
> this stage, but if there is a problem it takes longer. 
> Eventually it will kick out of the nice screen back to the
> plain text console and go on to initializing swap.  This is
> generally (90% of the time) where it hangs until I push the
> reset button (sometimes it hangs just before starting the
> logon screen, but that's only if it never switched to the
> plain text console, and it is rare).  I'd say that it has
> problems every 1 in 3 boots.
>
>   I had similar issues with an areca 1110 card I had
> previously, though it seemed to go away if I forced fsck to
> run every boot up (yes I know that sounds crazy but it was 5
> for 5 or 6 for 6).  
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Benj FitzPatrick
> University of Chicago
>
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