From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Nov 26 12:47:30 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0B1AE16A4CE; Fri, 26 Nov 2004 12:47:30 +0000 (GMT) Received: from lorna.circlesquared.com (host217-45-219-85.in-addr.btopenworld.com [217.45.219.85]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E4A4643D55; Fri, 26 Nov 2004 12:47:28 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from peter@circlesquared.com) Received: from [127.0.0.1] (localhost.circlesquared.com [127.0.0.1]) iAQCkw50058168; Fri, 26 Nov 2004 12:47:11 GMT (envelope-from peter@circlesquared.com) Message-ID: <41A725C2.30204@circlesquared.com> Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 12:46:58 +0000 From: Peter Risdon User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041124 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: craig@small-pla.net References: <000001c4d3af$0dd69240$6500a8c0@jupiter> In-Reply-To: <000001c4d3af$0dd69240$6500a8c0@jupiter> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: WRITE_DMA failures on 5.3 (but NOT on 4.10) X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 12:47:30 -0000 craig wrote: > hi, > > i wrote about this issue some weeks back, but have still not yet adequately > resolved it. > (http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-questions/2004-November/0638 > 07.html) [...] > to repeat the original problem, when installing 5.3R it fails about 12% into > extracting base into \ > on the emergency terminal, there is a stream of warnings and failures > reading: > > WARNING : WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC ERROR FAILURE : WRITE_DMA status = 51... blah > > this continues until i run out of patience. This is a really major problem that has affected every 5.3 and the more recent 5.2.1 machines I've operated with largish [1] hard drives. The novelty of losing several tens of gigs of data any time a drive gets busy wears off fairly quickly. > > the advice i received was : ... mainly about checking hardware, and this is _not_ the issue. I've googled extensively on this and, as you did, replaced every hardware component in the IDE lines, including the disk drives, without affecting the problem. So far as I can make out, there was a change to default settings at some point (I haven't scoured the CVS repository to find out exactly when) to enable DMA because some newer drives require this[2]. This also affects some attempts to install from CD using CDRW/DVD drives[3]. The only answer seems to be to disable DMA and I hope to put together a test machine in the next week to experiment with this. So far as I can see, there's a chance that adding: hw.ata.ata_dma="0" to /boot/loader.conf might help but I haven't yet tried this. Peter. [1] - at least >80G but I'm not sure where it kicks in. [2] - http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/current/2004-11/0078.html [3] - http://adam.kungfoohampster.com/lists/freebsd-stable/msg09493.shtml -- the circle squared network systems and software http://www.circlesquared.com