Trouble with FreeBSD 5.2.1 and SATA

[Forrest Aldrich]

I posted a message recently about troubles encountered with FreeBSD-5.x 
and my SATA drives, controlled by an on-board Silicon Image chip.

I understand there were some code glitches in between and thus my update 
via CVS and subsequent rebuild of the system created a problem.

However, just to be sure, I brought my machine in to the shop to be 
tested.   Windows/XP has no problem booting up and it recognizes the 
drives.  So I returned the machine here and have tried to reinstall 
FreeBSD-5.2.1-RELEASE and am now encountering more problems.

When I partition the drives, I make sure that all 4 (SATA) drives are 
consumed by FreeBSD and that newfs (added -b 16384 -f 2048 options to 
some partitions) is performed.

The listing of drives is in reverse order:

ad10
ad4
ad6
ad8

(I think that was the correct prefix)

I first selected "4" as the root drive, and selected the standard MBR.   
When the installation was complete, I rebooted and the boot process 
couldn't find a valid partition and I was left at the "boot" prompt.   I 
reinstalled, using "10" as the root drive, again selecting "standard 
MBR" for each drive (just to be sure) and the same thing happened: 
invalid partition, etc.

Clearly the boot record is being read, as I'm at the boot prompt.

I did run into an error I've reported before, where FreeBSD complains 
about the disk's geometry, and says it is using something "more likely" 
-- as I recall, that was the right route to go - as I entered in what I 
see in the SOYO BIOS and it still complains.

I'm stumped as to what the problem could be at this point; any 
assistance in resolving this would be appreciated.   I know I should 
have gone with SCSI and I probably wouldn't be having these problems now 
;-)  But this is what I have.    The SATA drives are 80gb's (less prone 
to problems).


Thanks,
Forrest