Anyone else having trouble with Samsung 160G drives?

[JJB]

Sounds like bio's problems. Check mfg web site of motherboard in
question for bio's update. What kind of drives does client have on
box now (mfg & size)? Are existing drives used as straight IDE
drives? Try Freebsd formatting them on your box before putting them
back into clients box.  I have noticed that newer motherboards (IE:
1GB speed cpu's and faster) have an different version of bois which
FBSD has problems using. 5.x versions have been trying to fix this
with no good results to date. Some people have reported that adding
device puc to kernel, forces use of different method to read bios
and things work using it.  Check out 3rd party bio's vendor
www.unicore.com for plug in replacement bio chip. Use ms/windows
fdisk to break 160 gb into 2 partitions before putting then in
clients box. You have to play around trying different things, there
is no simple answer.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Bill Moran
Sent: Monday, May 10, 2004 1:24 PM
To: questions at freebsd.org
Subject: Anyone else having trouble with Samsung 160G drives?

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.

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?

--
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com
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