Thank you soo much for putting the time in to the problem eraser! I really appreciate it :)
No I didn't have a drive attached at boot but I know from previous boots it does detect properly and functions fine. It just doesn't format and mount the drive.
So the dmesg output shows 4 channels (2 SATA and 2 PATA)? It looks to me like there is only one ATA channel!? I'm not too good at reading dmesg output.
I looked at an old PC I have with built in IDE ports, and one "ATA Channel (such as "ata0") supports two physical IDE drives (which for me show up as "ada0" and "ada1"). So you are ok.
Yes I did update the rom to the latest but for some reason the version it displayed after was an earlier version than the original one but it didn't make a difference to the functioning of the device so I gave up trying to diagnose the problem.
Sounds like your ROM update did not work? You may need to first update to an older release (such as 1.06.79) before you can update to a newer release.
I will give changing the registers a go I think. Bit worried about messing it up though so I will have to look at how it can be reversed if I do change it and it stops functioning.
I think a power off and back on again would be sufficient to revert the registers back to defaults.
You are completely right about buying new drives. When I can invest in some I definitely will, I just wish I hadn't invested in a controller which doesn't work with FreeNAS (despite spending countless hours finding a suitable solution).
I would like to try and sort this problem because I know from forums that other people have used these cards and have had problems with the IDE side of the card too. I just wish there was a PCIe card that could support a couple of PATA drives :-/
Perhaps look for something using the JMB368 chipset? That chipset only offers a single IDE port (no SATA ports). However, I could only find one card on Amazon with that chipset and it is more expensive and I'm not sure if it has FreeBSD support.
Again, thank you for your help!
You are very welcome!
