freebsd stable - Dec 2004 - trouble installing 5.3 on soekris net4801

I am unable to install FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE on my
Soekris net4801, which has a SanDisk Ultra II 512MB
Compact Flash card as a hard drive. The kernel probes
the drive just fine but when it comes time to write or
read from the drive, specifically in sysinstall, I
get;

ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left)
LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left)
LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left)
LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left)
LBA=1
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out

Then sysinstall says;

"ERROR: Unable to write data to disk ad0!"

To do this manually, with fdisk, disklabel and newfs
works up until the computer has rebooted and tries to
load the root filesystem. It hangs for a little while
then starts spitting out those READ_DMA errors and
finally refuses to mount ad0s1a as root.

Disabling DMA in loader.conf doesn't seem to have any
effect.

Any ideas here would be much appreciated.

Have you tried booting up in safe mode?
I have a similar issue running 5.3 STABLE on a machine which runs fine 
with 5.3 BETA7.

Booting into safe mode works fine.  Any other way, and it gets ATAPI 
errors or SCSI errors (if I take all ATAPI stuff out of the kernel).

Still trying to find the real source of the problem...

Good luck,

Lapo


On Dec 7, 2004, at 8:31 PM, Crucio wrote:
> I am unable to install FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE on my
> Soekris net4801, which has a SanDisk Ultra II 512MB
> Compact Flash card as a hard drive. The kernel probes
> the drive just fine but when it comes time to write or
> read from the drive, specifically in sysinstall, I
> get;
>
> ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left)
> LBA=0
> ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
> ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left)
> LBA=0
> ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
> ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left)
> LBA=0
> ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
> ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left)
> LBA=1
> ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
>
> Then sysinstall says;
>
> "ERROR: Unable to write data to disk ad0!"
>
> To do this manually, with fdisk, disklabel and newfs
> works up until the computer has rebooted and tries to
> load the root filesystem. It hangs for a little while
> then starts spitting out those READ_DMA errors and
> finally refuses to mount ad0s1a as root.
>
> Disabling DMA in loader.conf doesn't seem to have any
> effect.
>
> Any ideas here would be much appreciated.
> _______________________________________________
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> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to 
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>

I shall try this. Do you have any idea what differs
for the IDE driver (I presume ATAng) when booting into
safe mode?

--- Lapo Nustrini <lapo@seanet.com> wrote:
> Have you tried booting up in safe mode?
> I have a similar issue running 5.3 STABLE on a
> machine which runs fine 
> with 5.3 BETA7.
> 
> Booting into safe mode works fine.  Any other way,
> and it gets ATAPI 
> errors or SCSI errors (if I take all ATAPI stuff out
> of the kernel).
> 
> Still trying to find the real source of the
> problem...