NetRAID array will not boot after rebuild

[Bob Ababurko]

I am running a D4942 Netraid3 card booting freebsd 5.4. The setup is running 4 9.1 GB drives, three of which are in raid5 and one set as a hot spare which is set to automatically rebuild. I understand that this card is not supported with this OS, but if anyone can answer my questions that pertain to the hardware that would be a great help.

The scenario goes like this. The system is running with the above setup and I am booted into the OS. I failed a drive at the login prompt and i can see the other drive(hotspare) drive light go on. This tells me that it is rebuilding. The only problem is that I cannot actually log in at this point. If I enter user/pass, it just keeps giving me another loginprompt. This is perplexing to me since I thought that I would be able to use a RAID5 array in degraded mode, so I did another test. Again, I have the same setup running on the 3 disk Raid5 plus one hot spare and I shutdown the system and unplug a drive from the raid5 volume and boot the system. The card starts beeping and tells me to press a key not allowing the OS to boot. I press a key, taking me into the config utility(also ctrl+m). The drive is being rebuilt with the hot spare. When the rebuild is done and it is back to optimimum, I reboot the box. The box boots, card firmware loads and just when the OS starts to load(FreeBSD cursor starts spinning), the box reboots itself. This will happen forever until stopped.

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong, if anything or is this card bad? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,
Bob