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Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 11:39:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Howard Lew <hlew@genome.Stanford.EDU>
To: Peter Olsson <pol@leissner.se>
cc: Gary Palmer <gpalmer@cdrom.com>, Nate Williams <nate@sri.mt.net>,
        hardware@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: EIDE controllers 
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On Thu, 1 Feb 1996, Peter Olsson wrote:

> At 17:00 1996-01-31 -0800, Gary Palmer wrote:
> >Nate Williams wrote in message ID
> ><199601312229.PAA17481@rocky.sri.MT.net>:
> >> > I'm looking for an EIDE controller which will work with FreeBSD and
> >> > allow >>500MB drives to be used in a multi-OS boot situation. A
> >> > Promise 2300+ card doesn't work :-(
> >
> >> Any IDE/EIDE controller will work, as *long* as you make sure FreeBSD's
> >> root partition starts/end below the 512MB mark.
> >
> >
> >BZZT
> >
> >The Promise 2300+ won't even allow the kernel to be loaded, no matter
> >what options you enable/disable :-( It fails during the LOADING of the
> >kernel, and FreeBSD doesn't get a look in :-(
> >
> >Gary
> 
> I have a Promise EIDE machine with a seagate 1G-HD that wont even begin
> reading a perfect 2.1.0 boot disk. The disk has no problems on other
> machines and dos boot disks works fine on the EIDE-machine. But Promise EIDE
> and freebsd boot doesn't work for me. The machine just looks at the disk for
> a millisecond and then hangs completely. No loading whatsoever.
> 
> I tried to get it to work, but I have given up. Fortunately my boss is a big
> freebsd-fan, so I will soon have 1G-SCSI instead. However, if anyone finds
> out anything about this, I'm still interested to know what was wrong.
> 
> Peter Olsson   pol@leissner.se
> 

Just a wild guess... Have you tried this?

Go into the CMOS setup and turn off both hard drives (say that you don't
have any installed).  Then try booting up the FreeBSD 2.1R boot disk. 

It's still able to install on the hard drives because it doesn't use the
BIOS.  This trick works on the DTC controller with Enhanced BIOS, so it
may work in your case.