TIMEOUT/FAILURE_WRITE_DMA on ServerWorks HT1000 SATA150

[Oliver Schonrock]

We have a Dell SC1435 with the above SATA controller which was running 
FreeBSD6.2 fine for about 3 months.

We re-built it with FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE from scratch (ie complete new 
install from CD). Installation failed while copying base system from CD 
to disk.

Suspecting a possible hardware issue we rebuilt it again with FreeBSD 
6.3. It built and ran fine, thereby eliminating any hardware problems.

Repeated attempts of installing FBSD7.0-RELEASE continued to fail at 
slightly different points, but always when writing to disk. Virtual 
Console 2 showed the following errors:

NMI ISA 20 EISA
ad4: TIMEOUT WRITE_DMA
aNMI ISA 20, EISA
FAILURE - WRITE_DMA. retrying

I suspect this is related to other (S)ATA related problems which have 
been reported on this list, eg:

<http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=1489302+0+archive/2008/freebsd-current/20080120.freebsd-current> 


I would be happy to provide more information to help debug this problem, 
however it is slightly difficult as I cannot even get the system 
installed under 7.0.

Any suggestions on how to get better info. I could also look into 
providing remote access to the machine.

Thanks

Oliver Schonrock