Rob
2005-Feb-01 23:15 UTC
Disk operation fails since 5.3 for newer harddisks and older motherboards
Hi, I had several PCs running 4.10, when I gradually upgraded them to 5.3. Occassionally I had great difficulties, which appeared to be somehow related to the motherboard, the harddisk and the UDMA selection...... or something like that (sorry, I'm not an expert on this!). All PCs have just simple harddisks; no such things as RIAD, SCSI, but simply IDE connected disks. Emperically, I have come to following conclusions: Big problems occurred always when the motherboard is older (supporting only UDMA66 or less), and the harddisk newer (being able to handle UDMA100). When going ahead with regular FreeBSD 5.3 installation, this ended with kernel panic at bootup after installation, or, on another PC, with odd behavior after boot (e.g. X kept crashing for no reason). These problems always got solved by manually adding to /boot/loader.conf: hw.ata.ata_dma="0" This fix also implies, that the harddisk seemed to be forced to operate at PIO4 speed, although UDMA66 should be possible in this case. Apparently it's the motherboard-harddisk speed mismatch, which FreeBSD 5.3 cannot handle decently. When motherboard and harddisk speeds match (both new, or both old), there are not such problems as mentioned above. Any other people with this experience? Any idea why such problems suddenly pop up with 5.3? Regards, Rob. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com