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

[Benj FitzPatrick]

Thanks for the tips David, unfortunately nosmp caused a crash
of some sort (it was pretty much all gibberish) before
starting init.  The other two had no effect.  For a while IRQ
balance wasn't shutting down properly, and every time that
happened I would get this boot up failure.  However, now it
doesn't seem reproducible.  I may try update 3 and see how it
works.
Benj

---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 23:18:41 -0800
>From: "David A. Ranch" <dranch at trinnet.net>  
>Subject: Re: [rhn-users] Iwill DK88 hangs randomly during
init with sata raid card  
>To: Red Hat Network Users List <rhn-users at redhat.com>
>
>
>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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>
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