FreeBSD 7.0 SATA Controller

[Dieter]

> Finally, the behaviour you're experiencing with your machine (re: the
> progress bar stalling 2/3rds of the way through) sounds almost as if the
> hard disks aren't spinning up quick enough after a soft reset from
> within FreeBSD or Linux 2.4.

The disks should have spun up long before a reset gets issued.

> > for some reason i cannot mount any sort of media in freebsd 7 systems.
> > the computer handles the booting of the cd's fine but freebsd cannot
> > for some reason handle the mounting of disks.

It is the firmware (and maybe a bootstrap) that boots a CD.
Once control is handed over to the FreeBSD kernel, then the
kernel has to be able to talk to the disks.  It is the FreeBSD 7
kernel that is having the problem.

> > the next step im going
> > to take is installing 6.2 and remaking the world but adding device
> > aptic to the kernel.
> 
> I think you mean "device apic" to the kernel?

No, it is "device aptic".  It was in 6 but removed from 7.  I had to add
aptic to get my nforce4-ultra board to boot 7.  Given that 6 runs on
Shaun's machine and 7 doesn't, adding aptic is a useful thing to try.