ATA HDD installer issue

[J. T. Farmer]

Kevin Oberman wrote:

>Don't forget that any "modern" BIOS and HD will be using LBA, not CHS,
>for addressing the disk and disks have not had the same number of
>sectors per track on all cylinders for a long time, so the numbers are
>bogus in any case. CHS does not allow properly addressing any
>modern drive and BIOS always "makes up" the values reported (but not
>used, to the best of my knowledge) and those work fine in every case I
>have encountered.
>
>I'd just ignore the warning and proceed.
>  
>
I did that.  I don't know if that's part of the problem (I have  
AthlonXP 2200
with a Via KT266A chipset),   I get the same types of complaints from
sysinstall, I ignore the warning, it leaves a good size chunk of disk at the
end unused, then I get error messages about failing to initialize various
slices and structures.  Check screen #2, lots of WRITE_DMA error
messages while doing the superblocks.

Tried booting the install kernel in safe mode.  Still get the warnings
about the values reported by the BIOS (which is set to auto-detect
the drives), but it successfully creates the disk and goes through
the install.

My BIOS reports the values of Cyn 38309, heads 16, Sectors 255.
It's a WD800, 80GB ATA100.  So I'm getting the same errors
on install as the OP, and it appears that I have the same problems
with the controller & drivers that other VIA users are...

So far, if I boot the install using safe mode, I can install.  However,
on reboot, the log goes crazy with WRITE_DMA errors, and things
start getting flaky (don't know exactly what is happening, I gave up
on it for a few days...)

Are the two problems related?  Will installing the ATA III patch set ###
fix any of this?

Oh, yeah, Obligatory whine...  WinXP installed into a partition on this
machine without a problem...

John
     FreeBSD since 2.0.2....  Starting on a 486/50....

----------------------------------------------------------------------
John T. Farmer            Owner & CTO                GoldSword Systems
jfarmer at goldsword.com     865-691-6498               Knoxville TN
    Consulting, Design, & Development of Networks & Software