Some time ago, I was reporting terrible performance problems with my IDE
hard drive under the on-board VIA IDE controller.  This afternoon, I
picked up a $20 controller from SIIG.  Under NetBSD dmesg, it probes as:

 /~~~ dmesg

pciide1: bus-master DMA support present
pciide1: primary channel wired to native-PCI mode
pciide1: using irq 10 for native-PCI interrupt
pciide2 at pci0 dev 9 function 1: Triones/Highpoint HPT366/370 IDE Controller (rev. 0x01)
pciide2: bus-master DMA support present
pciide2: primary channel wired to native-PCI mode
pciide2: using irq 10 for native-PCI interrupt

 \___ dmesg

When I moved the cable from the on-board controller to the PCI controller,
the boot loader runs, giving me a choice between NetBSD and my GNU/LINUX
installation (hm, I didn't try booting GNU/LINUX...).

Selecting NetBSD (or allowing it to default to NetBSD after timing out)
causes a ``3'' to print, and then it freezes.

I've tried turning off all of the PCI and IDE frills in my BIOS, but I
can't get it to behave any better.  I'm going to go try running it under
GNU/LINUX and will post a followup.  In the meantime...

Is this supported?  I assume that it's dying in the boot-loader, and that
there should be no need to replace the boot-loader.  (It's the NetBSD
boot-loader if that matters.)

I also tried disabling the built-in controller completely; that didn't
seem to make any difference.  (Besides, *obviously* it's getting
somewhere, since t loads the boot-loader.  Right?)


I could just take it back and switch up to a more expensive controller.
Are there any that I should favor/avoid?

Thanks in advance.


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu