Now, when I connect the drives to port 1 & 2 of the controller, booting up stops with this:
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:0a.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8802200 ctl 0xF8802238 bdma 0x0 irq 17
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8802280 ctl 0xF88022B8 bdma 0x0 irq 17
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8802300 ctl 0xF8802338 bdma 0x0 irq 17
ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8802380 ctl 0xF88023B8 bdma 0x0 irq 17
ata1: no device found (phy stat 00000000)
scsi0 : sata_promise
ata2: dev 0 ATA, max UDMA/100, 312581808 sectors: lba48
------------[ cut here ]------------
kernel BUG at drivers/scsi/libata-core.c:2077!
invalid operand: 0000 [#1]
PREEMPT
Modules linked in:
CPU: 0
EIP: 0060:[<c025f60f>] Not tainted VLI
EFLAGS: 00010246 (2.6.12)
EIP is at ata_dev_set_xfermode+0xcf/0xf0
Can it deal with the fact, that the drives are not scanned in port order of the controller? They seem to be mapped like
port 1 > ata4
port 2 > ata2
port 3 > ata1
port 4 > ata3