ATA problems on Supermicro X6DHE motherboards

[Simon Crosby]

Hello,

I have a a machine with a Supermicro X6DHE-XG2 motherboard and one with
a X6DHE-G2 motherboard. When I try to install FreeBSD 5.4 on these
machines I get "FAILURE - ATA_IDENTIFY timed out" messages while the
installer is booting. The installer does manage to start, but when you
go to the fdisk screen it says there are no disks to install to. The
installation can be done in safe mode however.

When the installation is finished these machines hang during startup
unless booted in safe mode. I have seen instructions on the web for
creating a "safe mode kernel" that can boot without problems, but since
these these machines will be used for testing so it is important to have
the normal kernel.

I have also tried FreeBSD 6.0, with the same problems.

Here are some screen captures of the messages:
Error messages on the machines while booting the installer:
X6DHE-G2 http://www.baud-bandit.com/x6dhe-g2-install.png  
X6DHE-XG2 http://www.baud-bandit.com/x6dhe-xg2-install.png

Error messages on the machines while booting the installation:
X6DHE-G2 http://www.baud-bandit.com/x6dhe-g2-boot.png
X6DHE-XG2 http://www.baud-bandit.com/x6dhe-xg2-boot-page1.png
          http://www.baud-bandit.com/x6dhe-xg2-boot-page2.png

Another similar case i've seen:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-bugs/2005-February/011693.html

Any advice or help appreciated.

Simon Crosby