From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Mar 6 00:27:26 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id AAA13934 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Fri, 6 Mar 1998 00:27:26 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from caladan.tdx.co.uk (caladan.tdx.co.uk [195.188.177.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA13920 for ; Fri, 6 Mar 1998 00:27:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kpielorz@tdx.co.uk) Received: from tdx.co.uk (lorca-tx.tdx.co.uk [195.188.177.242]) by caladan.tdx.co.uk (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id IAA03240; Fri, 6 Mar 1998 08:27:05 GMT (envelope-from kpielorz@tdx.co.uk) Message-ID: <34FFB35A.12DD74E6@tdx.co.uk> Date: Fri, 06 Mar 1998 08:27:06 +0000 From: Karl Pielorz Organization: TDX X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Doug White CC: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Ye' olde IDE drive problems... References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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