IDE ultraDMA problem

[Sten Daniel Soersdal]

Mario Lobo wrote:
> Hello to all;
> 
> I had a MSI mobo 645 Ultra with 1.5G ram, pentium 4 1.7 Ghz, 3 IDE HD, 1 
> SAMSUNG 80 G, 1 SAMSUNG 120 G,  maxtor 120 G and a LG DVD writer. FreeBSD 6.2 
> recognized all HDs as ultraDMA 100. Fine.
> 
> Then a bought a ASUS p5vd2-x, 1G ram, Gforce 7200 video(pci-e), pentium D 940 
> Dual core and kept the same drives.  After tuning and recompiling the kernel 
> a couple times, I got almost everything working great ! SMP, acpi, network, 
> you name it, EXCEPT ultraDMA.
> 
> if I leave:
> 
> hw.ata.atapi_dma: 1
> hw.ata.ata_dma: 1
> 
> FreeBSD reports them (all) at ultraDMA 33. The system boots ok but after 7 or 
> 10 minutes (even if doing nothing), I start geting messages from 
> g_vfs_xxxx(); WRITE DMAERROR that can come from any of the drives until the 
> system becomes unstable and ends up rebooting itself.
> 
> if I leave:
> 
> hw.ata.atapi_dma: 0
> hw.ata.ata_dma: 0
> 
> The HDs get down to PIO 4 and the system works fine but at an incredible 
> performance cost. 
> 
> Finacial issues force me to make this work instead of buying more stuff.
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions,

There are usually one of two reasons for this;

1) Cable not being correct for slots (which UDMA33 suggests)
2) Controller not supported by driver (the controller does/requires 
something special)

I have had perfectly working cables not work just because the 
motherboard manufacturer decided they wanted to reorder some of the pins 
on the motherboard (and i wasn't using cables that came with the 
motherboard).

Perhaps you could post
'pciconf -lv'
together with
'atacontrol list'
and
'atacontrol info <device>'
where <device> is the names of the devices connected. E.g. acd0 ad0 ad1 
etc..
dmesg should probably help?

-- 
Sten Daniel Soersdal