Boot hang with 7.0-RC3 on Intel DG965WH, when SATA is 'Native'

[fmarc at enginet.com]

Team:

Congrats on the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release.

I've been a long-time user of FreeBSD (since 1.0). It's great to see
how far FreeBSD has advanced.

When I boot FreeBSD 7.0-RC2 and 7.0-RC3 (disc1 or livefs) on my Intel
DG965WH motherboard (Core2Duo 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, SATA disk & cdrom), I
see it hang after the probe, apparently when trying to mount the cd.

I have booted 6.0-RELEASE, 6.1-RELEASE, 6.2-RELEASE, and 6.3-RELEASE on
the same system configured the same way, and this problem does not
happen with any 6.x CDs.

The end of the probe is roughly:

[...]
acd0: DVDR <PLEXTOR DVDR PX-755A/1.08> at ata4-slave SATA150
ad6: 381554 MB <HITACHI [...]> at ata5-master SATA150
SMP: AP CPU #1 Launched!
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider acd0 is iso9660/FreeBSD_Install.
acd0: TIMEOUT - READ_BIG retrying (1 retry left)
acd0: TIMEOUT - READ_BIG retrying (0 retries left)
acd0: TIMEOUT - READ_BIG timed out
[...]

and then the last 3 messages repeat themselves for several minutes
before I gave up and hit the reset button.

I apologize for the sparse probe details -- I had to hand-copy /
hand-type the above.

If I configure my motherboard BIOS so that SATA is configured as
'Legacy' mode (the only other choice besides 'Native'), then I do not
experience the boot hang. The motherboard uses the Intel 965 chip-set,
there are 6 total SATA ports. I even tried plugging in my CD/DVD drive
into a lower-numbered port, that did not effect the problem.

While I know how to work-around the problem, I am posting about this
for 2 reasons:

1) Any other users who experience the same boot hang problem can
   hopefully use this knowledge to work-around the problem.

2) It took me some time to troubleshoot this and figure out how to get
   past the problem -- I hope this can be fixed before the 7.0 release
   because it makes 7.0 appear not to work/boot on these motherboards.
   My work-around is not a good permanent solution because that BIOS
   setting completely changes the BIOS numbering of all devices, and
   that causes problems for any other OS's already installed in other
   partitions.

If I may provide any other info or assistance with regards to
troubleshooting this, please let me know.

-Marc