freebsd stable - Apr 2012 - FreeBSD 8.3-R sysinstall does not "see" disks that are recognized during boot

I've got a new supermicro server I'm trying to get FreeBSD on. It uses
the
Intel c602 chipset, and it's my understanding that support for that 
chipset (c60X) was recently added via the isci driver. Ok, great, that 
explains why 8.2-R and 9.0-R didn't see the drives.

So, I grabbed the memstick image of 8.3-RELEASE that is on the ftp server, 
booted it up, and sure enough, as the dmesg scrolls I see it now properly 
recognizes da0 and da1, as it should (the memstick is da2). It sees the 
disks fine at this point, everything looks good.

However, once the system finishes booting and loads into sysinstall, and I 
go to partition the drives, I get "No disks found! Please verify that your 
disk controller is being properly loaded at boot time".

Any suggestions for avenues to troubleshoot this?  I have pictures to 
document if it helps.

Seems very odd. I confirmed the behavior with the SATA set to IDE, AHCI, 
and RAID modes. (The drives were recognized as da0 and da1 during bootup 
in all three modes, but not by sysinstall.)

Thanks,
Andy

---
Andy Dills
Xecunet, Inc.
www.xecu.net
301-682-9972
---

On 17/04/2012 23:02, Andy Dills wrote:
> However, once the system finishes booting and loads into sysinstall, and I 
> go to partition the drives, I get "No disks found! Please verify that
your
> disk controller is being properly loaded at boot time".
If you boot into 'Live CD' rather than the installer, can you still see
the drives in /dev ?

If so, you should be able to go ahead and install the system manually --
it takes a little knowledge of some of the low level management
commands, but it isn't particularly difficult.  If you wanted to use ZFS
for instance, you'ld have to do a manual install anyhow, and there are
many recipes around the web.

If the drives appear in the dmesg output and then disappear that's a
whole different kettle of fish.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey


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On 18/04/2012, at 7:32, Andy Dills wrote:
> I've got a new supermicro server I'm trying to get FreeBSD on. It
uses the
> Intel c602 chipset, and it's my understanding that support for that 
> chipset (c60X) was recently added via the isci driver. Ok, great, that 
> explains why 8.2-R and 9.0-R didn't see the drives.
> 
> So, I grabbed the memstick image of 8.3-RELEASE that is on the ftp server, 
> booted it up, and sure enough, as the dmesg scrolls I see it now properly 
> recognizes da0 and da1, as it should (the memstick is da2). It sees the 
> disks fine at this point, everything looks good.
> 
> However, once the system finishes booting and loads into sysinstall, and I 
> go to partition the drives, I get "No disks found! Please verify that
your
> disk controller is being properly loaded at boot time".
> 
> Any suggestions for avenues to troubleshoot this?  I have pictures to 
> document if it helps.
> 
> Seems very odd. I confirmed the behavior with the SATA set to IDE, AHCI, 
> and RAID modes. (The drives were recognized as da0 and da1 during bootup 
> in all three modes, but not by sysinstall.)

That does seem very odd - if they appear as daX then sysinstall should see them.

Can you go into the holographic shell (or livecd if you have it) and run..
echo /dev/da*
echo >/dev/da0
echo >/dev/da1

(this will trash the first sector of da0 and da1 but I assume that's OK
since you're installing on those).

If you could obtain a KLD for isci built for 9.0 you could load it in the loader
and see if that installer sees it, you might not have the facilities for that
though..

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C

>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:02:31 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Andy Dills <andy@xecu.net>
>To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
>Subject: FreeBSD 8.3-R sysinstall does not "see" disks that are
recognized
>    during boot
>
>
>I've got a new supermicro server I'm trying to get FreeBSD on. It
uses the
>Intel c602 chipset, and it's my understanding that support for that
>chipset (c60X) was recently added via the isci driver. Ok, great, that
>explains why 8.2-R and 9.0-R didn't see the drives.
>
>So, I grabbed the memstick image of 8.3-RELEASE that is on the ftp server,
>booted it up, and sure enough, as the dmesg scrolls I see it now properly
>recognizes da0 and da1, as it should (the memstick is da2). It sees the
>disks fine at this point, everything looks good.
>
>However, once the system finishes booting and loads into sysinstall, and I
>go to partition the drives, I get "No disks found! Please verify that
your
>disk controller is being properly loaded at boot time".
>
>Any suggestions for avenues to troubleshoot this?  I have pictures to
>document if it helps.
>
>Seems very odd. I confirmed the behavior with the SATA set to IDE, AHCI,
>and RAID modes. (The drives were recognized as da0 and da1 during bootup
>in all three modes, but not by sysinstall.)
Andy and I worked this out offline - workaround was to go to Options|Re-scan
which caused the devices to show up in the sysinstall menu.  I'm adding
details here for future reference.

1) C60x chipsets have the 6 traditional SATA ports, plus 4 or 8 SAS ports.  Only
the latter are controlled by the isci(4) driver.
2) The IDE/AHCI/RAID modes apply only to the traditional SATA ports.
3) In Andy's case, going to Options|Re-scan Devices caused the disks to show
up.  This problem seems to be system or platform-dependent, as I was not able to
reproduce with 8.3 memstick image on my C600 systems.
4) There was a problem with initial device scan using isci(4) on 7-STABLE, which
necessitated r233371.  This was MFC'd back to 8-STABLE, but after 8.3 was
released.  I'm fairly convinced this is the root cause of Andy's
problem, but don't have any easy way to verify.

>Thanks,
>Andy
>
>---
>Andy Dills
>Xecunet, Inc.
>www.xecu.net
>301-682-9972
>---