freebsd stable - Mar 2006 - Still can't boot on 6.0-STABLE > Nov 2005 or 6.1-BETA

Hello folks,

A while back (January) I posted to the list about a problem I had
booting 6.0-STABLE built with sources after about November 2005 on my
workstation.

Since that point, and including (I have now discovered) 6.1-PRERELEASE
(as my freshly built kernel identified itself just now), I can't boot.
At the point where the kernel should mount my root fs and continue
booting, it decides it can't see any disks other than fd0, and
presents me with a "mountroot>" prompt.

Looking through the scrollback, it correctly identifies my ata
controllers earlier in the boot process.

A boot -v (captured over serial) is available here:
http://sakaki.jamesoff.net/~james/dmesg-broken.txt

A successful boot is available here:
http://sakaki.jamesoff.net/~james/dmesg-working.txt

When I get to the mountroot> prompt, my IDE light is stuck on solid.

At the time I initially reported this problem I was running amd64. I
have since moved back to i386 (mainly for things like nvidia-driver
and win32-codecs), but the problem persists :(

My motherboard is an A8V-E Deluxe, and my disks are on both IDE and
SATA; the IDE disk plays no role in my FreeBSD boot (it has WinXP on
it). FreeBSD lives on my SATA drives. 5.3 and 5.4, as well as WinXP,
have no problems with the disks. I'm not doing anything funky like
RAID or geom.

I did try posting a PR for this a while back, but it never even seemed
to be recorded.

If I'm sending this request the wrong way, please let me know! I'd
love to help get this fixed so I can take advantage of the latest and
greatest on this machine :)

Thanks in advance,
James

On 3/15/06, James Seward <jamesoff@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello folks,
> [booting problems with newer kernels]
Replying to myself in case this is of use to anyone else.

After some tinkering this evening, I had determined that unplugging
all my PATA devices (leaving just the SATA ones, where FreeBSD lives)
allows a normal boot, although this isn't acceptable as I need my DVD
drives.

Disabling APIC in the BOIS with the PATA drives plugged in allows
booting. I tried booting with it enabled and telling FreeBSD not to
use ACPI but that didn't help.

Mark Linimon asked me to check to see if my PR was showing up now and
if not resubmit it, so I shall do that too.

/JMS