From owner-freebsd-questions  Thu Sep  7 21:28:32 2000
Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Received: from mail.rdc1.az.home.com (ha1.rdc1.az.home.com [24.1.240.66])
	by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5029C37B422
	for <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>; Thu,  7 Sep 2000 21:28:29 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from home.com ([24.1.247.6]) by mail.rdc1.az.home.com
          (InterMail vM.4.01.02.00 201-229-116) with ESMTP
          id <20000908042829.LLZA12685.mail.rdc1.az.home.com@home.com>;
          Thu, 7 Sep 2000 21:28:29 -0700
Message-ID: <39B84AE0.3A37DB86@home.com>
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 19:11:44 -0700
From: Joel Mc Graw <jpmcgraw@home.com>
Organization: Joel_at_Home
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 4.1-RELEASE i386)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: lart@mfn.org
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: ATA66 troubles under 4.0R vs 3.4
References: <0ad401c0186b$ddaddc20$c991f280@mfn.org> <20000907112141.H7718@wantadilla.lemis.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Precedence: bulk
X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG

Greg Lehey wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday,  6 September 2000 at 20:35:08 -0500, graphics wrote:
> >     After seeing uncountable sudden "drive deaths" on *brand new*
> > drives, we did a little digging (thank god for the archives!) and
> > have noted the many similar tales of woe...
> 
> "similar" doesn't mean "the same".  What do you mean by "drive
> deaths"?  If the drive has really failed, it's very unlikely to be
> connected to FreeBSD.
> 
> > Now, since 3.4 reportedly does not suffer from these troubles, we
> > are going to go back down to 3.4, however, we would like the
> > transition to be as painless as humanly possible, so: Can we simply
> > do an overlay of 3.4 onto a 4.0 system?
> 
> No.
> 
> > Also, is it known whether 4.1 has fixed the 4.0 ATA66 problems?  How
> > about 5-stable?
> 
> Nobody knows if you don't know.  How do you expect us to know what the
> problem is?
> 
I think this is an unhelpful answer.  I ran into the same problem
upgrading from 3.1 to 4.1r.  I noticed that dmesg claimed that the cable
was not DMA66 compliant (it was).  After some research, I DID see a lot
of similar complaints (drive dies) with one common thread: they were
Quantum drives.  Mine was a Quantum Fireball.  Brand new.  I went out
and bought a Maxtor, and reinstalled FreeBSD.  No problems. 
Interestingly enough, I still have the Quantum in the machine, but it's
now the secondary master.

> If you're running into a real problem with the new ata driver, you can
> build a kernel with the wd driver instead.  That's a lot less work
> than reinstalling the system.  But I can't decide whether that's the
> case until I see some evidence.

Obviously, building the kernel with the wd driver would be cheaper than
buying a new drive...


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message