Unable to write to disk during installation

[Gary W. Swearingen]

"Mattia Popolla" <mattia.popolla at tele2.it> writes:

> and sorry for my bad english!

I noticed nothing unusual about it, for e-mail.

> I'm trying to install FreeBSD/i386 5.3-RELEASE
> FROM A DOS PARTITION.

Fine English, but I don't understand.  I'm sorry if there
is some standard install method like this I'm unaware of.

> I have two HD units, with no partitions:
> Primary master - C: - ad0 (the "primary partition")
> Secondary master - D: - ad2
>
> I copied the distribution in C:/FREEBSD.

Yeah, but you copied to it where?  How did you copy it?  What
commands to computer?

> Booting FreeBSD from floppies I get some error messages,
> like these:
>
> ad2: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error4: aborted   LBA 1
> ad2: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error4: aborted   LBA 1
> ad2: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error4: aborted   LBA 2
> ad2: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error4: aborted   LBA 1
> ...

Does "Booting FreeBSD" mean "booting FreeBSD "kern.flp" floppy, or
what?  When do you get those messages?  You usually should also report
messages seen just before and just after your problem messages.

> Unit ad2 is an old 1624 MB Western Digital HD
> (model WDC AC31600H, PIO MODE 4, no ULTRA DMA)
> but IT IS NOT FAILING, all the clusters are OK,
> and it works perfectly with MS DOS/Windows.
> I've also freshly formatted it using the MS-DOS FORMAT command.

The latter was a waste of time, except maybe as a kind of test.  The
results of the format was just some change of data on the disk
partition, which the FreeBSD install doesn't care about.

> Can this be a driver problem?
> The other HD (unit ad0) seems to work,
> but I can't make partitions in it!
> What can I do? Please help me!!!

It does look like a driver problem, to this amateur -- no driver
expert.  It seems to have detected a PIO device as a DMA device.  I'd
check my BIOS setup to see if I can force PIO instead of DMA.  I'd try
removing the slave device, if any.  If desparate, try swaping
primary-secondary.  At last resort, maybe a BIOS update.  That's all I
can think of, other than the standard support advice of trying to
install a more recent (or even older) OS version.