5.3 -> 5.4 breaks ATA (Intel ICH2)

[Tim Howe]

I've got a machine here that I'm trying to install FreeBSD 5.4 on.  It's
identical (except for the hard drive) to another machine that I ran the
4.x series on for some time with no issues.

I've got several other Pentium 3-based machines running 5.4-RELEASE-p3
with a GENERIC kernel, and I have a 5.3 installer disk, so my strategy
was to do a minimal install of 5.3, then NFS mount /usr/src and /usr/obj
from my organizational build server and upgrade to 5.4 from there.

The 5.3 install went smoothly, make installkernel went smoothly, but
when I tried to reboot I got an error saying that it couldn't find the
root filesystem.  Further investigation found that it wasn't able to
find the ATA HDD (master on ata0) at all, but could find the ATAPI CDROM
drive (master on ata0).

I verified that the drive had not gone bad by again booting off the 5.3
installer disk, which found ad0 with no difficulty.  I then downloaded
the 5.4 mini-CD, which was unable to find ad0.  Finally, I swapped in
another hard drive with identical results.

Neither booting with ACPI disabled (didn't bother to check whether this
machine even has it) nor booting in safe mode helped at all.

I did happen to notice that when the 5.3 CD boots, there is a delay of
several seconds when probing ata0.  Could this be a timing issue with
regard to the controller?

The machine is a Gateway ATXSTF FED Pro M1000 with a 1GHz Pentium III
and 256MB of RAM.  It has an onboard Intel ICH2 UDMA100 controller.  The
first HDD I tried was a Western Digital Caviar 32500 2559.8MB drive, and
the second was a Caviar 24300 4311.9MB drive.

If necessary, I'm willing to build custom kernels for testing purposes
or to add debugging statements etc, if anyone can give me pointers in
the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Tim Howe
Software Engineer
Celebrity Resorts, Inc.