freebsd has problems with bios

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Kamal R. Prasad" <kamalp at acm.org> writes:

> I have verified integrity of the hard disk and this problem shows up
> on a new samsung 1604N hard disk too. It is a hard disk independet
> problem.
> 
> On 13-Oct-05, at 5:49 AM, Peter Clutton wrote:
> 
> >> For some reason, the values of hard disk geometry (cylinders/head/
> >> sectors( are not accrptable to fdisk and when i agree to using
> >> freebsd 's idea of disk geometryt, during sysinstall -I get an
> >> error:-0
> >> UDMA_100 error:READWRITE Failure ICRC error.
> >>
> >
> >
> > Usually fdsisk asks you to check what the bios reports as the CHS
> > and enter that
> > manually, using the g option i believe. Have you tried this?
> >
> The bios has 4 modes auto, large, lba, chs in which to access the
> hard disk. I ttried all 4 modes and it  doesn't solve the problem.
> > However as stated above, and looking at those errors, this may be a
> > hardware problem.
> >
> The hardware is stable and I expect any hard disk to give the same
> error essentially because the interaction between bios and freebsd is
> the cause of the problem.

A CRC error?  Doesn't seem likely.  Why do you say so?  It's not
like FreeBSD is using the BIOS at all at that point...

Personally, I'd try another ATA cable; that's the most frequent cause
of this particular symptom.