I have an ASUS P5GDC-V Deluxe motherboard with the works.  It's a
recent LGA775 socket model, has a Celeron D processor in it, supports
EMT64 and all that.  It has ATA and SATA RAID, and the ATA RAID uses
the ITE 8212 chipset.  It has PCI-X.

I have been having problems with this.  I know the ITE 8212 ATA / IDE
RAID chipset is supported by NetBSD and is in -current and will be
backported to 1.6 and 2.0 (thanks Grant Beattie!)

I always thought I could just switch off this RAID stuff and use my
disk space as ordinary ATA disks.  Not so.  No matter what I do with
this board in the BIOS or with the connectors, nothing works as
expected.  I believe there are known problems with this (searched
lists and found Grant's reply in current-users).

I don't know what to do with it: return the board, or help improve the
driver if I can, or just use it with one disk and one DVD-RW drive on
the single ordinary ATA port.  But my disks are never auto-detected by
the BIOS.  Seems like there are teething problems with the ITE 8212
and maybe the ASUS BIOS, too.  I suppose that if I have NetBSD's boot
code in the MBR and the kernel using the ITE8212 driver things will be
fine, but I may not be able to use GRUB to boot other OSes and will
waste all that lovely disk space I have (2x 160GB disks and 1x 80GB
disk.  I like to have Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Windows 2000
installed, with NetBSD my main OS that I use every day).

Maybe a solution for me is to buy a well supported Promise ATA/IDE
controller for the PCI-X slot.  (I wonder if I can get a PCI-X 16x
card?  I don't use it: I like the integrated graphics).  Maybe then I
can use my disks as normal and everything, GRUB included, will just
work.  What a waste of an expensive motherboard... :-(

--
James