# Gentoo 64bit und Silicon Image 3132 PCIe Raid Controller

## chrisk2305

Hi!

I really have a big problem with my silicon image 3132 raid controller. Ich have gentoo 64bit kernel 2.6.23 r3 installied. I wanted to move my system raid1 (2x160gb sata) from my old pci sata controller to my new sil3132 pcie 1x controller. The bios of the controller recognizes the two disks without problems. I permanently compiled in the driver for sil3132 chipset in the kernel. When i boot with the disks off the controller, lspci shows me the correct controller:

```
fileserver ~ # lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 7910

00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 7912

00:06.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 7916

00:07.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 7917

00:12.0 SATA controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 Non-Raid-5 SATA

00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI0)

00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI1)

00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI2)

00:13.3 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI3)

00:13.4 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI4)

00:13.5 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB Controller (EHCI)

00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 SMBus (rev 14)

00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 IDE

00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 PCI to LPC Bridge

00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 PCI to PCI Bridge

00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration

00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map

00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller

00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon X1200 Series

02:00.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller (rev 01)

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 01)

04:05.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3112 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)

04:07.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev c0)

fileserver ~ #
```

But if i connect my two disks to the sil3132 controller my system doesn't boot. I get an error message like this:

ata5: softreset failed....

ata6: softreset failed....

and so on. I'm kinda new to linux, so your help is much appreciated.

Excuse my poor english, i'm from austria  :Wink: 

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## NeddySeagoon

chrisk2305,

What sort of raid1 are you using - BIOS raid, with device-mapper or kernel raid ?

If its BIOS raid, you may not be able to migrate the raid sets between chip sets as the data layout on the drives is under control of the different BIOSes. Also drive ordering on the connectors may be important to BIOS raid.

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## chrisk2305

i am not using the bios raid....its kernel raid1

```
fileserver ~ # cat /proc/mdstat

Personalities : [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]

md1 : active raid5 sdd1[2] sdc1[3] sdb1[0] sda1[1]

      1465151808 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]

md2 : active raid1 sdf1[1] sde1[0]

      128384 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md3 : active raid1 sdf2[1] sde2[0]

      497920 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md4 : active raid1 sdf3[1] sde3[0]

      9767424 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md5 : active raid1 sdf5[1] sde5[0]

      7815488 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md6 : active raid1 sdf6[1] sde6[0]

      138078528 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices: <none>
```

Where md2 is my boot partition, md3 my swap and md4 my root partition. The raid works perfectly on my pci controller...but not on my pcie controller.

There should be no problems with driver letters since all my disks are raid autodetect formatted

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## NeddySeagoon

chrisk2305,

You have 6 drives there supporting different raid arrangements.

If you mix up drives in the same raid arrangement, it works. That its your raid 5 drives can be arranged in any order as long as they are /dev/sd[a-d]

Likewise, its ok to swap over /dev/sd[ef]

I'm not sure about other combinations.

Where does the boot fail?

Before or after the grub splash screen ?

If its before, I suspect that the BIOS is reordering your drives - so grub, if it loads at all is looking on the wrong drive for grub.conf.

If the kernel loads and decompresses, what does it show about detecting your raid sets.

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## chrisk2305

Hi,

md2= boot

md3= swap

md4= root

all drives are formatted as "raid autodetect" so there is no messing with the drive letters.

Grub loads and the kernel is decrompessing. I'll post the output from the kernel as soon i have time to.

Thanks for your reply!

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## chrisk2305

Hello!

after Days of working on the problem i finally found the solution. I had to do a BIOS Update on ASUS 690G Board and everything was working fine after that!

So if you have a problem with your silicon image 3132 controller on a 690G Board, try to update your Bios to the most recent version.

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