Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 17:04:42 -0700 From: Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com> To: Freek Nossin <freeknossin@planet.nl> Cc: dmitry@atlantis.dp.ua, 'Carl Johan Gustavsson' <carl.gustavsson@bahnhofbredband.se>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: partioning failed Message-ID: <20061026000442.GA2448@icarus.home.lan> In-Reply-To: <026201c6f886$6a245570$9f00000a@edx2> References: <453BEA39.5000508@bahnhofbredband.se> <026201c6f886$6a245570$9f00000a@edx2>
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On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 12:39:21AM +0200, Freek Nossin wrote: > Then I tried Carl's advice and bought a 80-connector cable. And amazingly > enough... It worked! > > But I wonder, why is FreeBSD so picky about it? My previous Windows > installation did not itch a bit. And should this not be documented anywhere > (or should have, because SATA is the standard nowadays)? My opinion: because Windows hides a lot of details about subsystem layers and information coming from the disk subsystem, particularly the disk subsystem, from the end-user. This is ESPECIALLY the case when it comes to DMA-based transfers. Windows (2K, XP, and 2003 -- it doesn't matter which) tries very hard to hide such problems. No matter how much you trust the Event Log, it all boils down to whether or not the programmer of the service or the driver chooses to even bother sending a diagnostic message to the Event Log service. Of course, the same could be said of *IX OSes; what if FreeBSD didn't bother to tell you about those DMA errors? You probably wouldn't have mailed freebsd-stable (or if you did, it would've been regarding bad disk performance). Understand where I'm coming from? I have also seen systems where Linux and FreeBSD report major disk errors (guaranteed bad blocks as later detected by the SCSI controller), while under Windows showed absolutely no signs of problems (until smartctl under Cygwin was used, which detected an immense number of hardware ECC errors on write, and reported the drive in "IMMINENT FAILURE" status). Informing the administrator of problems (by being verbose) before the system completely fails is a Good Thing, and is one of the many ad hoc benefits of present-day *IX operating systems versus Windows. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
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