freebsd has problems with bios

Andrew P. infofarmer at gmail.com
Thu Oct 13 10:48:29 PDT 2005


On 10/13/05, Kamal R. Prasad <kamalp at acm.org> wrote:
> The motherboard is from "American Megatrends Corp" and it runs Award
> Bios.
> I am pasting below info from dmesg below:-
> ----------------------
> CPU: AMD Athalon(tm) XP(1468.47-Mhz 686 class CPU)
>     Origin = "AuthenticAMD" Id = 0x662 Stepping = 2
>     Features -0x383f9ff<FPu,VME,DE,PSE,F\PSE,TSC
> ,MSR,PAE,MCE,CXU,SEP,MTER,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMx,FXSR,SSE>
>    AMD Features=0xc0480800<SYSCALL,MP,MMX+,3DNoq+,3DNow>
> ..
> npx0:[FAST]
> npx0: <math coprocessor> on motherboard
> npx0: INT 16 interface
> acpi0: <VIA694 AWRDACPI> on motherboard
> ...
> ata0: <ATA channel0> on atapci0
> ata1: <ATA Channel 1> on ataci0
> ad0: <Samsung SP1604N TM100-30> at ata0-master UDMA100
> acd0: dvd r drive at ata0-slave UDMA33
> ad2: 39083MB <Maxtor 4D040H2 DAH017K0> at ata1-master UDMA100
> ad0: WARTNING -READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=63
> ..
> ad0: FAILURE -READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR>
> error=84<ICRC,ABORTED> LBA=63
> ad2: WARTNING -READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=63
> ..
> ad2: FAILURE -READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=84<ICRC,ABORTED>
> ---------------------
> sector 63 is where the first partition starts.
> Both discs work perfectly in windows XP  and the -and if there was a
> cable/hw [roblem it would have shown during their functioning under
> windows xp.
>
> pl. let me know if you need any more info from the system.
>
> thanks
> -kamal
>

Do you honestly believe that a leading BIOS vendor
would manufacture a motherboard and install a
BIOS from its main competitor?

Anyway, AMI does not manufacture motherboards
which support AMD processors.

Your controller is probably recognized as
atapci0: <VIA 8233 UDMA100 controller> ...

It is fully supported, there's no doubt about that.
I'll bet you have some problem with cables,
they can claim to be ATA100-compatible, but
you should try other ones, maybe more expensive
ones. Windows and Linux might have a better
(in some ways) driver implementation, which
somehow handles faulty cables (by more
aggressive CRC recovery mechanisms, for
example).

When you check your cables, recheck them,
and redo it all over again - and you're dead
sure that they are in top-notch condition
(please, try at least two different 80-conductor
ones, I mean apart from those that are there
already, and at least one 40-conductor cable),
you should try upgrading to at least RELENG_5
(5-stable), or better yet RELENG_6 (6-current).
In case the problem persists you can try to
reopen pr i386/62687:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=62687
or to send a new pr, which references this old
one.

Thanks for your time. Post here any follow-ups,
I'll try to help you.


Cheerz,
Andrew P.


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