3 things working in -STABLE and not in -CURRENT

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On Tue, 24 May 2005 07:57:34 +0200, Søren Schmidt <sos at FreeBSD.org>
wrote:

> On 24/05/2005, at 7:29, Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:
> 
> > I've been corresponding with Soren about a very similar problem.  My
> > DVD writer on ata1-master is not being recognized.  Instead, my
> > CD-RW on ata1-slave is being configured as acd0.  I've been doing  
> > daily upgrades (amd64), but still to no avail, and Soren seems to be
> > stumped as well.
> 
> I don't think this is the same problem, yours seem to be interaction  
> between the two drives that somehow makes the probe barf...

I've tried your suggestion, enabling/disabling each device (in the BIOS)
and rebooting.  I even completely disconnected the power to the box
for a minute, just in case something had gotten "stuck" in some weird
state.  But no matter what I do, even with the ata1-slave device marked
as "Not installed" in the BIOS, it keeps getting configured as acd0.

Most baffling.  Both devices used to probe and configure perfectly, and
from what I can gather from booting from a CD-ROM (where both devices
appear as normal), there are no hardware problems *per se* that I can
discern.

I wish I had known about the reputation of the nVidia nForce3 chipset
*before* I (rather impulsively) bought this machine.  I suspect my
problem is due in no small part to the notorious wonkiness of this
particular chipset.  :-(

Is there any way to gather some more verbose diagnostics, besides a
simple "boot -v"?  So far, atacontrol and pciconf haven't proved to be
very useful at all.  Are there any other tools, in the base system or in
ports, that may shed some more light on what's happening here?

I think for now I may just revert to RELENG_5 and see what happens. 
The irony of the situation is that I had only just recently really
started "getting into" using my DVD drive, and it really hurts now to be
without it. :-(

I do hope this problem will not continue to plague me through future
FreeBSD releases.  If so, that may leave me no choice but to switch to
another OS entirely, which I would *really* hate to have to do, as I've
been using FreeBSD for nine years now, and have really come to love it.
Switching to a whole new OS at this point (even another BSD) would not
only sadden me greatly, but I downright shudder at the prospect of
having to come to grips with what I could only rightly consider an
inferior platform, as FreeBSD is definitely the best in my book.

Oh well, we'll just have to wait and see, I suppose.  Things
generally have a tendency to work themselves out eventually.  I just
wish it would be sooner rather than later.  :-)

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads at cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"