# System installation using Silicon Image 5723 controller



## narcolepsy (Jun 16, 2011)

Hi folks, 

I recently bought a new motherboard for use as a fileserver (MSI X48 Platinum) which has 4x SATA internal ports (controlled by ICH9) and 2x additional internal ports controlled by Silicon Image 5723. I had assumed after reading that this would be EHCI compatible and thus would work out of the box for installing FreeBSD onto (I'm trying to decide between 8.2-RELEASE and 9.0-CURRENT at the moment).

I am aware that the chip is not directly supported through the list of supported hardware, but was wondering if I'm barking up the wrong tree trying to get this working.

(BTW, it shows up as ad4 in 8.2 and ada0 in the 9.0 installer, but refuses to install using it).

Any info would be greatly appreciated.


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## mav@ (Jun 17, 2011)

Silicon Image 5723 is a SATA port multiplier, connected to Marvell 88SE6111 PATA/SATA chip on that board. You should use ahci(4) driver on 8.2-RELEASE to support it. 9-CURRENT for last month has it by default.


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## narcolepsy (Jun 17, 2011)

Thanks for the reply mav, but as this is an install from scratch, I've been having a few issues with it saying it couldn't fdisk ada0 and it bombs out, this was using [CMD=]bsdinstaller[/CMD]

Do you have some debug tips to get some information out of using a livecd USB attempt, so at least I know what is causing the error?


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## mav@ (Jun 17, 2011)

Any info you can. For now you haven't given any. _Verbose_ dmesg and error messages could be a good start.


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