quoted

I had them all flashed to the latest current version which was
2.20.0.15 when i started having problems. Each card was verified to
that version as well. Some did have older firmware on them.

The same problems were seen before / after flashign the card. As
far as i could tell the promise bios will run form the first card
and init the other cards it could be configuring something there
which nobody else is aware of. However this only showed drives /
drive interfaces form the first 2 cards never the 3rd card. After
the bios has init'ed the carss the bios doesnt run on any other
cards.

Yes, this is true, but shouldn't harm. See below.

quoted

When booting the machine will 3 cards and no drives attached the
bios is loaded and unloaded 3 times. This is why i belave something
is getting enable / disabled on the other cards by the bios.

Hmm, I'm running 3 TX2/100 (even with different revisions) without 
big problems here:

00:09.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. 20268 (rev 02)
00:0a.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. 20268 (rev 02)
00:0b.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. 20268 (rev 01)


Besides these error messages, the drives seem to work fine, although 
as I investigated now, the dma modes look strange:

<snip dmesg / drive info>

Also strange..

These drives on the third controller are used only sporadic. 
The first 4 build a RAID5 array with hot spare and are used 
heavily (main server for diskless clients, mail, imap, samba, 
etc...) and the system sports 67 days uptime ATM :-).

Yeah thats what i had although when i tried to write to both disks on the
3rd controller (1 disk on each channel) the machine would lockup
do you see the same problem ?

also note that the card i have are a 20269 yours are a 20268
which is slightly different.


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