Smart Array 5302 diagnostics (it's locking up)

[Michael Emboss]

The main question: is there any information on what the diagnostic LEDs are showing, and/or is it possible to use the UART connections for diagnosing problems?


I've had a SA5302 (with 64MB cache + BBU) in my system for about a year, and it's been working great with 6 drives (5 in a RAID5 array + a single drive). In the last few days, however, it's started to give me a bit of trouble.

The problems started after a power outage a few days ago. The power was out for a couple of hours and being a desktop system there was no UPS. Following this event, the controller has been locking up every so often. At least, I'm guessing it's locking up. The two flashing LEDs stop flashing, three amber LEDs light up (among others), and the controller stops responding (sometimes locking up the whole computer in the process).

I suspect this may have something to do with the IRQ situation - my graphics card (9800XT), the SA5302 (in slot 2, a 64 bit 66MHz slot), the onboard sound, and the onboard networking are all sharing the same IRQ 17. The problem pretty much only manifests itself when playing games with the SCSI drives active, though sometimes it will fail (lock the machine) when the screen resolution is changed during boot. Ie: when the SA5302 and graphics card are both active. Additionally, when this failure occurs, the onboard sound stops working too.

I can throw any amount of load at the SA5302 by itself and it doesn't have a problem. Why this problem didn't occur prior to the power outage has me lost. Possibly accumulated system changes (it hadn't been rebooted for a bit over a month) meant that it's being used slightly differently after the reboot.

Anyhow, I'd like to try and track down what's causing this. Obviously, this isn't even close to the sort of system that the card is designed to work in, so I'm not expecting any help from HP. What would be useful, however, is some technical docs on the card. The pattern of LEDs lit when it crashes might help me track down the cause, and I'd love to know if something useful is being sent out over the UART. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find anything. Does anyone have some links or documents for this card?

I'm going to do some card shuffling to see if I can fix it, but unfortunately the AGP/SA5302 IRQ conflict can't easily be resolved - the AGP slot and PCI slot 2 share an IRQ, and PCI slot 1 (with a different IRQ) can't be used due to the height of the cooler on the graphics card. Also, the three remaining slots are 32 bit, 33MHz slots on a secondary cascaded PCI bus, which through poor design has very low write performance. I'm going to play around with the LAN and sound things though to see if that helps.


Important system specs:
[] MSI K7D Master-L (AMD 760MPX chipset)
[] Two MP2600 CPUs
[] ATI 9800XT (AGP slot, IRQ 17)
[] Smart Array 5302 with 64MB cache + BBU (PCI slot 2, IRQ 17)
[] AMD AC'97 onboard sound (IRQ 17)
[] Intel PRO/100 S onboard ethernet (IRQ 17)