Installation on Dell Latitude c840 -- hard drive problems

Brad Chapman chapmanb at uga.edu
Wed Mar 26 20:05:06 PST 2003


Hey all;
I just purchased a Dell Latitude c840 which I'd like to install 
FreeBSD on. This is my first time installing FreeBSD on a laptop,
although I do have experience installing it on desktop stations. 

The problem I am currently having is that I can't get the hard drive to
be detected correctly during installation. The hard drive is a Hitachi
DK23EB-40 with a 82801CA/CAM UltraATA IDE Controller. The BIOS appears
to see the hard drive correctly and reports it's size as 40010 MB (which
is what I'd expect). It also appears fine under the installed Windows
XP.

I get two separate problems depending on the version of FreeBSD I use
for the install:

FreeBSD 4.8-RC2 (also 4.7-RELEASE)

ad0: DMA limited to UDMA33, non-ATA66 cable or device
ad0: 188MB <HITACHI_DK23EB-40> [383/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33

The reported size of 188MB is obviously not right and is what I get when
I try to go ahead and do the paritioning during install.

FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE

ata0-master: timeout waiting for interrupt
ata0-master: ATA identity failed

In this case the hard drive isn't recognized at all.

I'm completely stuck with these problems and am not sure what things I
could try. I'd be very appreciative if anyone could give me some
direction to go. I'd be more than happy to provide any other 
information that could be helpful. 

Thanks in advance!
Brad


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