Boot-time hard drive errors

[Martin Alejandro Paredes Sanchez]

On Sunday 24 February 2013 14:33:06 Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> I have a somewhat eclectic system, currently running (or at any rate,
> trying to run) 9.1-RELEASE.  The system in question contains three
> drives, to wit:
>
>    <WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 05.01D05> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device
>    <ST3500320AS SD1A> ATA-8 SATA 1.x device
>    <Hitachi HTS541010A9E680 JA0OA480> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device
>
> Previously, I had the ST3500320AS in this system, along with one other
> entirely different Seagate drive, i.e. one not shown in the list above.
> (Also, I was previously running 8.3-RELEASE and only recently updated
> to 9.1-RELEASE.)
>
> Since I reconfigured the system to its current state, i.e. with the set
> of three drives listed above, whenever I reboot the system, about 50%
> of the time, when the boot process gets down to the point where it
> would ordinarily be printing out the messages relating to ada0, ada1,
> etc. suddenly I start to get a massive and apparently endless stream
> of error messages, apparently relating to one of the drives listed
> above, but the stream actually alternates between two consecutive
> error messages, both undoubtedly related to each other.
>

Does your HDD controller is SATA 3?

I had a similar problem (some times could not boot) and was caused because my 
HDD controller is SATA 1

Intel ICH5 SATA150 controller

And my hard disk is SATA 2

WDC WD2500AVVS-00L2B0 01.03A01

The problem disapear when I lock the HDD at 150 MB/s (jumper settings the HDD 
to SATA 1)