Re: ASRock A785GMH/128M fails to find devices when in RAID mode and disks are present

[Andrei Borzenkov]

29.07.2016 17:29, Xen пишет:
> Just want to report that I have a motherboard (A785GMH/128M) that will
> fail to boot the moment a RAID disk is present.
> 

Is it EFI or legacy BIOS?

> Grub will just not see any devices. It will fail with a message that
> (hd0) could not be found.
> 
> "ls" then yields nothing, an empty line as output.
> 
> This is also true when booting from USB stick. It will fail to boot this
> stick, even though all required partitions etc. are on the stick itself.
> 
> An alternative motherboard with the same chipset that I have lying
> around will boot without issue although I have not configured an array
> on it yet; but this motherboard simply allows "Single Disks" to pass
> through and neither the usb-stick-grub nor the hard-disk-grub have a
> problem with it. So I have yet to test what happens when I take out the
> disk that is currently running this system and put it in that other
> system so that the RAID controller will see a "configured "SPARE DISK""
> or something.
> 
> Motherboard is ASRock A785GMH/128M, socket AM2+, SB700, memtest86 runs
> fine (from an SD-card when the disks are present) and the Kubuntu DVD
> also boots as normal (have not allowed it to run to see if it will
> recognise the "array").
> 

So what exactly "normal" means here? Do you have any evidence bootloader
on this DVD can see disks?

> So this is just AMD firmware RAID, using the Promise "pdc" driver. I
> know that on a different AMD motherboard (SB710, 760G) I could not get
> Linux to boot (fully) but it was clear Grub didn't have any problems
> back then. The installed Grub on both test disks (usb + harddisk) is the
> Ubuntu version that is over a year old. I mean that it is at least as
> old as May 2015 as I mentioned under my developer nick on the devel
> list. So I haven't tried an actual new version yet based on current Git.
> 
> Is anything like this expectable or known?
>

Usually add-on controllers have boot ROM that needs to be activated on
power on; so the very first sugestion would be to verify that this is
the case. Do you see array in the list of boot devices in BIOS setup?