Need help installing on SATA

Joseph Olatt joji at eskimo.com
Mon Oct 13 16:39:28 UTC 2008


On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 11:06:51PM -0500, Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:
> Does anyone know the magic incantation that will permit me to install 
> FreeBSD on this new machine of mine (nVidia chipset, SATA1 disk 
> controller)?
> 
> I've been trying for a week or so now, with no luck.  Just out of 
> curiosity, I downloaded and ran Ubuntu 8.x, and it recognized all of 
> my hardware automatically.  The FreeBSD installer (both in 7.x and 
> 8.x), though, can't find my hard drive or CD-ROM.
> 
> I *really* don't want to have to resort to Linux, not after using 
> FreeBSD for 12 years now, but if I can't find a solution to this 
> problem, I'll have no choice.  :-(
> 
> Thanks for any advice.


Hello Conrad,

Recently I had a similar problem. My motherboard is:

NVIDIA MCP73

Fortunately, the above motherboard also has an ATA controller. So I
installed an ATA drive and installed FreeBSD 7.x.

Later I tried to patch the ata drivers but didn't get it right. See the
following thread:

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=101821+0+archive/2008/freebsd-stable/20080921.freebsd-stable

 
Later on, Andrey V. Elsukov provided a patch. See the following thread:

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=206853+0+archive/2008/freebsd-stable/20080928.freebsd-stable


I can now see the SATA drive (thanks to Andrey V. Elsukov) that is 
installed in the system with Ubuntu. But I'm still have some issues 
with the DVD Writer that is also connected to the SATA controller. I'm
getting read errors when I try to view a DVD. I haven't had the time 
to research it yet.

Maybe the above will help.


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