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Date:      Sat, 1 Apr 1995 10:08:12 -0500 (EST)
From:      Glenn McMillen <mcmillen@pond.com>
To:        questions@FreeBSD.org
Cc:        Glenn McMillen <mcmillen@wanda.pond.com>
Subject:   Big EIDE problems.
Message-ID:  <Pine.3.89.9504010929.A20327-0100000@wanda.pond.com>

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Hi:
I'm trying to load up Free BSD 3-22 snapshot on my new PC.  It's a
Digital Starion 300i (75Mhz Pentium, 850 Mb IDE drive by Maxtor, 
and lots of other stuff)  Anyways, here'smy story:

First, I backed up just about everything I could. Then I took off the
windows swap.

I then partitioned the drive using fips 1.4 (since fips 1.1 that's now 
available at cdrom.com doesn't work for eide drives, I needed to get the 
latest and greatest version.) Ok, I sliced up my drive to 350MB for BSD, 
the rest for DOS. Seems OK. DOS still comes up and it says it has less
space available to it.

Then I tried doing FreeBSD install.  No luck because I didn't run fdisk 
on the other partition. It still looked like DOS. So I reran FreeBSD 
Install package.  Set up 20MB as /, 32MB as swap and the rest as /usr. 
Then I went to install. It started doing its thing when the following 
error appeared:
wd0a: wdstart: timeout waiting to give command writing fsbn 1008 of 
1008-1023 (wd0 bn 928368; cn 460; tn 16; sn 0) wd0: status0 eror1 <no_dam>

It never went away so I rebooted and tried again.  Well, it "seemed" to 
have worked.  I went throught the complete install with the cpio disk and 
was told to reboot from the hard drive.  So I did so.  The boot question 
came up and I chose FreeBSD form the menu (instead of DOS). OK, it starts 
to come up. I go through all the hardware chacks that happen when you 
reboot. Then I get: <excuse me if it's wrong, my wtining is attrocious>
wd0<something  something> MAXTOR 7850 AV
wd0 end bad 32 <word> from partition table (count value 16 restored)

So this leads me to my bios and my ide controller.  CMD-PCI0640x
I got these programs  with my computer by cmd technologies.  One of them 
is called CMDIDE.EXE. In this program, I can mes with some of the values 
of the ide controller I think.  Here's what I have:
	PIO Mode:  Auto set to 33Mhz
	Secondary Channel: disabled
	Translation Method: LBA (vs Cyl head Sector)
	
	Host Timing: Regular
	Data Width: Wide 32 Bit (vs 16 Bit)

Here's what my Phoenix Bios 4.04 said about my drive:
	1654 cyl
	16 heads
	63 sectors per track
	1654 landing zone
	8 sector multi sector
	LBA mode enabled
	32 bit io disabled
	transfer past PIO 3
	read ahead mode enabled

OK, I think I need to disbale the LBA mode control, but where and what 
effect will that have? Now do I change the bios setting or the settings 
in the cmd program?  If I do change the LBA to CHS mode, will dos just 
stop reading once it gets to 528 MB or will the drive, thus leaving a 
bunch for BSD? Or will DOS try to use the entire physical disk for the 
528MB thus overwriting anything on the BSD slice?

Lastly, if I change the drive configuration to LBA mode off, then will I 
lose everthing I had on there with DOS? I don't really want that since I 
like the way it's set up and I really don't want to reload from floppies 
everything I backed up. Yuck.

So it seems like I'm 90% there, but I'm not sure about what Ineed to do 
next and where I neeed to do it from, the BIOS or the CMD program 
CFGIDE.EXE? Also, will reconfiguring to CHS mode instead of LBA mode ruin 
what I already have on the DOS partition?

Thanks in advance,

Glenn 



####################################################################
Glenn McMillen                                     mcmillen@pond.com
Exton, PA 19341



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