Maxtor Ultra ata/133 controller, FreeBSD 4.[5,8], and the boot process

[Soeren Schmidt]

It seems Charles Peterman wrote:
> 
> As it turns out, the latest rev of the Intel SDS2 motherboard also rev's its 
> ICH4 ide controller, turning it into a useless piece of PIO crap and 
> destroying my systems' performance and sucking down my weekend.
> 
> After contacting Soren Schmidt concerning the state of the ata driver and 
> whether a quick hack would be appropriate, I decided to venture into using 
> a PCI add-on card controller, in this case the Maxtor Ultra ata/133 
> controller.  There is only one disk aside from the 3ware raid, which does not 
> show up as an ata device.
>
> The install CD for 4.5 installs to this drive without a problem, but it tells 
> me that the loan disk is at ad4.  Upon reboot, the boot loader fails, 
> horribly, no loader found.  Rebooting with the install CD, and going into the 
> loader's command line, I find that my disk is listed as disk2s1, and not the 
> disk4 I thought it would be. 

That sounds very strange unless you move it physically to the other channel..

However 4.5 is way too old for this purpose, try 4.8 that has a much better
chance of supporting that board (I'm not sure which Serverworks chip it
has one there, the docs I found for the SDS2 didn't tell)...

> Is there a variable I could set during boot to get the disk to show up as ad0?  
> SImilar to the way removing ATA_STATIC_ID from the kernel compile does.

no.

-Søren