Date: Fri, 06 Mar 1998 08:27:06 +0000 From: Karl Pielorz <kpielorz@tdx.co.uk> To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Ye' olde IDE drive problems... Message-ID: <34FFB35A.12DD74E6@tdx.co.uk> References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980305132624.24493K-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu>
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Doug White wrote: > > > > > And run a "newfs -b 8192 -f 1024 > > > > The rest? - should there be any rest? - That's the line that > > /stand/sysinstall issues to format the partition! ;-) > > No device to format is specified. Usually you just run `newfs > /dev/rwd0s1a' or whatever device you want to format. Oops... Thats what happens when you copy the stuff from Sysinstall (Hard to beleive I know what I'm doing!)... > > > You need to enable your ide controller; it's not responding to interrupts. > > > > Peripherals | Onboard IDE Controller: Both > > You just told me you turned it off... That would imply that the > controller is disappearing. That is not good. No, what's actually happening is: The IDE controller is enabled in the Peripherals section of the BIOS, the BIOS's hard drive table (i.e. Drive C: = Not installed, Drive D: = Not installed) means the system will not try to boot off the IDE drive, and will continue to boot from the SCSI - and FreeBSD (when it's installed it's driver) will let me use the IDE - as it's not booting from the IDE it doesn't need the geometry from the BIOS (aka Dangerously Dedicated etc.) > > Does the IDE driver just giveup after a timeout or something? - the machine > > gets rapidly unstable after that... > > It doesn't like the IDE controller going on vacation; you loose swap and > thus chunks of processes. SCSI can put up with it a little better. Hmmm... This doesn't really apply to me as my root filesystem, swap - in fact everything the system needs is on SCSI, not ide... I could understand the system going south if the swap / root filesystem disappeared. but not when just the IDE controller / drive is giving it grief... _ANYWAY_ The good news is I solved the problem... Looking through LINT I decided to fiddle with the flags for wdc0... The drive will hapily work with 'Multi-Block I/O' on (the drive reckons it supports 16 block mode), but not with 32 bit transfers on. As soon as 32 bit transfers are on - the system gets Interrupt Timeouts etc. I'm not really worried about 32 bit transfers at the moment, they would be nice (and the old drive I used to use on the system must have supported them - as they were still in my kernel config), but I can wait... Thanks for your help Doug! Regards, Karl To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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