Samsung SC-152A CD-ROM not working with FreeBSD 4.8/5.0/5.1
Per von Zweigbergk
pvz at e.kth.se
Tue Jun 24 08:19:47 PDT 2003
I have recently built two computers:
1) shiba:
Microstar 865PE-Neo2 LS motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor with 800 MHz bus
Three Intel Pro/100 (fxp) adapters
One cheap Geforce4MX AGP card
Western Digital 120 GB hard drive
Some floppy disk drive
Samsung SC-152A CD-ROM drive
2) danneman:
Asus P4P800 motherbord (also with the same Intel 865PE chipset)
Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor with 800 MHz bus
One Intel Pro/100 (fxp) adapters
One cheap Geforce4MX AGP card
3ware Escalade 7500-4 IDE RAID card
Three Western Digital 120 GB hard drives in a RAID-5 configuration
Some pretty generic Tekram card for SCSI (can't remember exact model
number. It seems to work though.)
One HP DAT72 drive connected via SCSI
Some floppy disk drive
Samsung SC-152A CD-ROM drive
The Samsung drives are on a seperate IDE buses, connected with UDMA33
40-conductor cables to the IDE bus on the motherboard. The CD-ROM
drives are all properly jumpered for IDE master operation.
The problem I'm experiencing with both these computers is with the
CD-ROM drive. Linux has no problem with the drive (as tested using
Debian GNU/Linux rescue disks as well as GNU parted boot disks).
However, upon attempting to run it with FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE
(5.0-RELEASE gave the same results), I got the following error messages
on the console:
ata1-master: timeout waiting for interrupt
ata1-master: ATAPI identify failed
(Booting verbosely gave no more information.)
And the CD-ROM was nowhere to be found in the system. Even though the
system had just booted of that very disk.
This in itself however, is not surprising. I have very little knowledge
about bootable CD-ROM:s, but from what I've understood, (this could be
wrong, but the general idea is probably valid), you basically put some
bootstrap code on a floppy image in a special place on the CD, and the
BIOS "pretends" that the part of the CD is actually a bootable floppy.
This allows FreeBSD to boot off the pseudo-floppy-on-CD without knowing
how to access the rest of the CD without the help of the BIOS.
All right, so FreeBSD basically can't access the CD-ROM drive. You'd
generally suspect FreeBSD not liking the IDE controller or the chipset.
Not so. When the drive is swapped for a CD-ROM drive of another
(non-)brand, it works flawlessly. The same behaviour is displayed on
both systems (not surprising, since the motherboards use the same
chipsets.)
What about 4.8-RELEASE I hear you think? Well, 4.8 didn't really like
the drive either, but it disliked it in a different way. :-) I don't
have the exact error messages available, but I believe it just got
stuck in a long loop complaining about something similar to
"ATAPI_SEEK_BIG". If you find it relevant, I can make bootdisks for
FreeBSD 4.8 and check this out and post the exact error messages
sequence.
Either way, if there is any other pertinent information I can give you
for resolving this bug, I'll be more than happy to provide it.
--
Per von Zweigbergk <pvz at e.kth.se>
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