Lockups with Compaq Smart Array 4200 and Tiger MP

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Alright, I'm pulling hair out over this, and I have a lot of hair, so it sucks. :|

I have a tiger mp. Works fine, had it for 7 months or something, doesn't ever lock up, runs for weeks at a time, etc. I got a compaq smart array 4200 scsi controller, which is 64-bit, 64MB cache, etc. I have no drives hooked up to it yet. First off, shouldn't it show something on boot? Nothing special happens, the machine boots exactly how it did before, you'd never know the card was in there. A couple times, the card just beeped on boot and the machine wouldn't boot. The lights on the card were all lit up and stuff. The machine booted most of the other times though, and it would run and whatnot, on one shutdown I saw it saying "stopping S.M.A.R.T monitoring service something or another", so it seemed like it was working right. Well, the machine would randomly lock up. I took the card out, and it doesn't lock up, or at least, hasn't yet.

So.. any ideas?

BTW, tried it in two different pci slots, that didn't help anything.

 

[sharkeeper]

What kind of video card?

Details, details, details PLEASE!

It sounds like an overlapping BIOS memory range.

Also, a lot of these Compaq HBA's require mild "hacking" (firmware) in order to work outside of the Compaq realm.

-DAK-

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: shuttleteam
What kind of video card?

Details, details, details PLEASE!

It sounds like an overlapping BIOS memory range.

Also, a lot of these Compaq HBA's require mild "hacking" (firmware) in order to work outside of the Compaq realm.

-DAK-

agp - g400, 32MB
pci0(64) - empty
pci1(64) - realtek 8139
pci2(64) - empty [tried compaq card here]
pci3(64) - empty [tried compaq card here]
pci4(32) - soundblaster (es1371)
pci5(32) - empty

 

[sharkeeper]

Is that board a 762MPX based board? Do you have the latest BIOS revision?

If you answer yes to the first and no to the second, get the latest BIOS from Tyan. If that doesn't help you may want to try over on 2CPU.COM. There's a few members that are familiar with getting those Compaq HBA's working on OEM x86 boards...

-DAK-

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Well... I take it back. It froze without the card.

It's 760MP, not MPX. The bios is the latest, 1.05 I believe.

The only other thing I did (that I can remember) to the machine was disable ACPI in the bios, so I just turned it back on. BUT I turned that off after the machine was locking up from what I thought was the card. I don't know what else could be happening. I put in a new (not connected, just screwed in) hard drive and moved the other, but that didn't hurt cooling, the drive is not hot at all. I moved around some IDE cables during all of this but they're all snug. Grrr.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Ok, it's working stably now. My kernel spewed a bunch of nice little messages at me on boot about the card, I'm gonna get the little boot floppies to config it. HOWEVER, compaq fvcking blows like so many other companies out there, and only provides boot floppy images that are hidden inside some inane windows .exe file, so I'm installing windows in vmware to deal with that. I really fvcking hate computers sometimes.