Hi,

I'm having problems with my Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 HDD connected to an Adaptec Serial ATA RAID 1210SA controller card.

Basically I get a full system freeze. It appears to happen much more frequently with reading than with writing.

I'm not sure what's the problem: HDD, controller or kernel driver.

I'm running kernel 2.6.5
modules loaded are: siimage, sata_sil and libata

The disk detected fine and I managed to partition and format it no problems. But the system freezes whenever I perform disk io to this drive for any length of time (seconds).

Does anyone have a system with this card working? I'm trying to determine if it's the kernel driver or my hardware. If someone out there has a working setup then I can discount the driver.


Thnx,

-Galik

I've been using the 1210SA with a 37GB WD Raptor drive for almost a year on a dual Athlon MP system, with excellent results. I could not get the community/stock drivers to work properly, so I used the Adaptec drivers. Unfortunately, at the time they only had Red Hat 8 drivers, so I had to install RH8. They now have support for RH9 and Suse 8.1. I'm hoping that the recent 2.6 kernels have good enough built-in support for this card so that I can move up to a newer distro.

I liked the Raptor so much I've recently purchased the newer 74GB model, and while I'm putting that drive in I'm going to try Fedora Core 2 with the 2.6.x kernel and see how the stock drivers are working now. If that doesn't work, I'll put RH9 + Adaptec drivers on it, omit the KDE rpm packages and use Konstruct to build the latest KDE onto that system, and hopefully use Yum and freshrpms to update RH9 to make it look like the latest distros.

Cool, can you let me know how that works out? Wether they do or they don't work on the 2.6 kernel?

Thnx

Will do. FC2 should release in a couple of days, and if the mirrors hold up I should have the ISOs ready for install by the end of the week. It won't take long to see if they work or not.

OK, after many hours last weekend trying to get my 1210SA to work on any version of Linux other than Red Hat 8.0, I failed miserably. Fedora Core 2 had the same "lost interrupt" problems as the 2.4 series. I tried Knoppix 3.4 in both 2.4 kernel mode and 2.6 mode, with the same results.

Here's the strangest thing, though: I couldn't get the Adaptec factory RH9 drivers to work, either! They were more unstable than the stock 2.4.22 and 2.6.5 drivers, which I didn't expect. I finally gave up (something I loathe when dealing with computers. I can usually beat them eventually) and kept my RH8 installation, which is rock-solid. I'm compiling KDE 3.2.2 right now, and with some other tweaks I should have RH8 looking pretty modern.

Try Fedora Core 2 or RH9, or even RH8, but my advice to you would be to return the 1210SA if possible, and go with the SIIG SAT212, which has the same chipset, but works with the stock drivers. I don't know if Fedora Core 2 will install directly to the SIIG or if you'll have to build a custom kernel after installing FC2 to an IDE drive, but I would suspect that it would work. I was really tempted to buy the SIIG (CompUSA has them for $40 USD), but after wasting most of the weekend and getting nowhere, I'm going to wait a bit before delving into more hardware "fun".

Best of luck, and if you need any assistance, especially with building a kernel and transferring the OS from the IDE drive to the SATA drive (assuming the FC2 installer doesn't recognize the SIIG), let me know.

I have been having exactly the same problem over in Tokyo also. Adaptec seems to providing trashy drivers for Redhat 9.0. I have tried all of their 1210SA drivers and wasted loads of my time. I have also tried installing Fedora Core 2 but the installation progressed very slowly. ( One step in installation takes like 10 minutes) I have tried most of my options with RH9 and FC2 now, that I am forced to go with Redhat 8.0. I wish people will see this message before doing to much and save time. There are better things to do in the sun. If someone finds out a way to get Adaptec 1210SA working in Fedora Core 2, please let us know.