Re: Installing FreeBSD-5.3 on Compaq AP200

Forrest Aldrich wrote:
> I have this spare machine banging around which I want to put FreeBSD on.
> 
> I'm installing 5.3-beta, booting off floppies.  The kernel boot 
> fails/stalls at:
> 
> ATAPI_RESET time = 60us
> ATAPI_RESET time = 90us
> ata1-master: FAILURE - SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE timed out
> 
> It identifies the 2 10gb drives in there as UDMA33.
> 
> Not sure what the problem is - I can tweak some of the IDE options in 
> the BIOS - currently set to UDMA.
> 
> If you let it sit for a while, it will eventually get to the "Probing 
> devices" screen -- and there it hangs some more.
> 
> Any ideas?  The BIOS is up-to-date, btw.
> 

I think it relates to the default modes for hard disk tranfers set
to UDMA rather than PIO mode where the drive claimed DMA support.
There seems to be an issue with some disks claiming to do DMA
transfers, but not actually supporting DMA transfers.

I have the same problem with a really old laptop that stopped booting
current months ago.  My drive does WDMA2, but the kernel tries to
make it do UDMA33 and I get interrupt timeouts.

To correct this, I mounted boot.flp and added the folloming lines
to /boot/loader.conf:

hw.ata.ata_dma="0"
hw.ata.atapi_dma="0"

You will have to after boot use atacontrol to set the mode to WDMA2.

And I'm now installing the latest 6 snapshot as I'm writing (well,
was until I discovered it doesn't support OLDCARD from the boot
disk).  Perhaps Soren or someone else can give the reason that the
kernel forces WDMAx devices to UDMAxx, rather than just doing WDMAx
with them.

Ian

--
Ian Freislich