Anyone else having trouble with Samsung 160G drives?

[Kent Stewart]

On Monday 10 May 2004 10:23 am, Bill Moran wrote:
> This is the weirdest problem I'm seen in a while.
>
> Client bought a pair of 160G Samsung SP1604N ATA drives.  I'm
> supposed to install them in an existing FreeBSD 4.9 system for
> additional storage space.
>
> As soon as the drives are installed, kernel won't boot.  It freezes
> up right before the "ad0: ..." messages appear and won't respond to
> anything except the reset button. Tried primary slave, secondary
> slave ... threw in a Highpoint ATA card and tried every possible
> configuration ... no dice.  This was on a relatively new AOpen mobo
> with a 2G processor (don't have the model # handy, but I'll get it if
> it's important)
>
> Moved the drives into an older 466mhz system ... same effect ... boot
> locks up at the probe message just before it would normally detect
> ad0.  In this new system, we even tried removing the existing drives
> altogether and starting from scratch on these drives ... the boot
> from the CD hangs just like everything else.
>
> So ... I brought one back to the office to put in a test machine so I
> could gather lots of good data, file a PR and get the problem fixed. 
> Threw it into an old lab machine (266 mhz SOYO board) and the sucker
> WORKS PERFECT! (so much for gathering data for a bug report)
>
> So ... I'm at a complete loss as to what I should do ... and a bigger
> loss on what I should recommend to the client.

I don't think it is the drive unless size is considered. There are bios 
problems when the size goes above 120GB or so. You may be bumping into 
this problem.If that is the case, a bios upgrade may let you use the 
HD.

Kent

>
> Does anyone have any experience with Samsung hard drives?  Are they
> buggy in some way?  I've got the feeling that I'm going insane ...
> seriously, these things work everywhere except where I need them to
> work (as an aside ... the client tried them in a Windows desktop
> machine and they worked fine there as well)
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions?  Thoughts?  Anything?

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html