From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jan 29 12:47:59 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from METAEXCH.sfo.metamarkets.com (unknown [207.105.12.135]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B84E437B69C for ; Mon, 29 Jan 2001 12:47:41 -0800 (PST) Received: by METAEXCH.sfo.metamarkets.com with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) id ; Mon, 29 Jan 2001 12:44:44 -0800 Message-ID: <86FC34EA3C4F074AA6BBFFE52ED83FED2A3C2B@METAEXCH.sfo.metamarkets.com> From: Matthew Fremont To: "'freebsd-questions@freebsd.org'" Subject: ata vs wdc for old IDE drives Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 12:44:43 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In trying to get 4.2-RELEASE running on an old machine, it appears that I'm running into the ata DMA problems that were discussed on the questions beginning last spring. The messages logged are like the following: ad0: HARD WRITE ERROR blk#nnnnn ad0: DMA problem fallback to PIO mode This is followed by a long series of "HARD WRITE ERROR" messages. My problem is that the fallback to PIO doesn't solve the problem. I've also tried adding "hw.atamodes=pio,---,pio,---," to /etc/sysctl.conf, but this didn't correct the problem either. Hardware (circa 1997) includes: FIC PA-2005 main board with VIA 82C586 IDE controller Seagate ST21621A (supports PIO mode 4, and multiword DMA 2) as primary master MITSUMI CD as secondary master no primary or secondary slaves The boot process correctly identifies the controller chipset and the hard drive, reporting "WDMA2" in the ad0 probe message. Using Seagate's SeaTools and format utility, I've verified that the drive and controller are working correctly. The diagnostic tests included successful tests of both PIO and DMA modes. My guess is that the problem stems from an incompatibility in the ata or ad code that occurs when the IDE controller supports UDMA/33 (according to the ata(4) man page) but the IDE drive doesn't. Is this a reasonable conclusion? I've rebuilt the kernel replacing the ata and ad devices with the obsolete wdc and wd devices. The system booted without the errors that I observed before. Other than the fact that the hardware won't run the GENERIC kernel, are there any liabilities running with the obsolte wdc and wd drivers? Thanks, Matthew Fremont To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message