I have an old spare machine (P4 2,8 GHz, 2 GiB RAM) which I'd like to reuse as a small home media/archive server with a few SATA disks. I do have an Asus P4PE with BIOS version 1007 and obtained a Silicon Image 3114 SATA PCI controller with BIOS version 5.5.00 in IDE mode, not RAID.
Now, after plugging in the card in PCI slot and attaching two SATA disks, the boot order was screwed up. My boot disk at /dev/ada0 was suddenly /dev/ada2and the OS did not boot of course (FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE). After some digging, I have figured out (w/ pciconf -lv) that the Silicon Image card is atapci0 and the Intel on board IDE controller is now atapci1. Moreover, booting from CDs or DVDs does not work anymore eventhough I have selected them in the BIOS BBS. Unplugging all SATA disks from the controller resolves the issue.
Changed PCI slots, even changed IRQ assignments to that PCI slot according to the manual lowering the priority of the card compared to the one on-board. No avail.
Regardless what I do, the SATA controller completely hijacked the order and I cannot change it. I am afraid that is related to my old mainboard and nothing can be changed here.
Any ideas how I can tell the system to have my on-board IDE controller be the first one?
Side note: I have a HighPoint HPT370 IDE RAID PCI controller in that machine. While it changes the atapci number too, it does not block booting from CD via the on-board IDE controller.
